Fireflies & Empty Skies
by Lysha
Summary: Humanity's last spark is about to fizzle out, and only the fallen sons and daughters of the Ark can save it. Alfie, Marlow, Willard and Loren are all victims of the system, but now the fate of the people who once disregarded them lies entirely in their hands. Despite the mistreatment they've faced, could they really turn their backs on the place they once called home? AU, OCs.
1. 18

**A/N:** Hey everyone, thank you so much for checking out this fic! My aim is to provide weekly updates, but for the best experience, please consider following the story on Tumblr, where you can find character profiles, playlists, artwork and lots of extras - the username is 100emptyskies. Hope to see you there, and as always, any reviews or favourites right here would be very much appreciated. Enjoy!

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 **'18'**

The day had arrived. There were no methods of keeping time within the confines of the cells, but he needed no clock or calendar to tell him what today was. He could feel it in his very bones, and it resonated through him like the most universal of truths. Every muscle, fibre and molecule in his body was celebrating their victory of another year survived, another year turned older, all the while fighting against the inevitability of human mortality.

It was his birthday. His eighteenth birthday. And though the number meant nothing to his eager body, it meant everything to him. Today was the day of his trial, the day that his fate was decided for him. The very notion of that fact made his blood curdle with undiluted rage; only one person was fit to decide his fate, and that was him.

He dressed as smartly as he could from his meagre supply of pre-issued clothes. For lack of a comb, he tugged his fingers through his sandy hair and swept it into his usual messy style. He had no mirror to see himself, but he knew how he would look being hustled into that courtroom. The fallen son of two prominent councillors, wearing clothes that were just a little too small for him, the sleeves hitched back just enough to show the bruises that littered his sallow skin, his knuckles cracked and bloody, a black bruise blossoming around one darkened eye. They expected him to stand before them as a criminal, a delinquent, and that was exactly how he appeared.

As he was dragged from his cell by four armed guards, he thought of how his appearance reflected what he felt inside. In short, it didn't, but there was no way for him to bare his soul to those who were to judge him, no way to project the myriad feelings he had towards life and society and injustice. If only they could see that, they might not do what they were inevitably going to decide to do: _float him_.

With a guard on each arm, one at his back and one at his front, he couldn't help but feel the extra security was unnecessary. He wasn't going to fight, not this time. He relaxed just enough to make it difficult for them to pull him along, but this, he would not resist. He would have walked, if only they'd asked. That was the problem with people, always leaping to conclusions.

The metal hallways of the Ark looked strange now he had been locked away for so long. He had walked and ran and played in these same hallways for all of his short childhood. As a privileged kid, he had been known and loved by many, but these days, he was not so well-received. People he used to know had gathered in doorways and corridors to watch him dragged to the courtroom. He soon became tired of the guards' tugging and began to walk, leading the way himself. He wouldn't give these bloodthirsty animals the satisfaction of seeing him struggle. He would go out with good grace, as he had always meant to. Let them watch his body float lifelessly past their tiny windows. Maybe the pressure would pop his skull and plaster his brains all over their window panes for one final, sweet revenge. He smiled to himself, imagining how it would feel for all the oxygen to rush out of his lungs in one, swift moment. He shook the bony hand of the Reaper, drifting ethereally at his side. His time was near, and he was ready.

He saw among the gathering crowd the mother and father of the classmate he had beaten and they followed him all the way down the hallway with their venomous glares. The father shouted as he was led away, calling him names and broadcasting the details of his crime for all to hear. _Coward,_ he thought. _Let's see you say that while I'm not cuffed and guarded._

But there would be no more of that. No more fighting. No more need to prove his point to anyone, for any reason. The struggle was over.

He dropped his gaze and tried his best to look apologetic as he was bustled into the courtroom. It was a small space, low-lit. At the other side, facing him as he entered, were the council. Among their ranks were the people he once called his parents, though their cold, indifferent expressions told nothing of familial concern. The guards remained by his side even as he was sat in the cold metal chair in the centre of the room. _The Death Throne_ , the prisoners had taken to calling it. Barely anyone who sat there got to walk away with their life.

"Alfie Seabrooke," began one of the council, a severe man he remembered as Luther Conway. "As today you have reached the age of majority, you have been brought here for the trial allowed to you by the laws of the Ark. Your sentence will be decided here and now. You are brought before us for the charge of assault in the second degree. First I must ask you: how do you plead to your charges?"

Alfie grinned coldly, looking his aging father right in the eye as he said, "Guilty." His father turned away. A small victory.

"Then I'm afraid this trial will be a short one," Luther said, with a shake of his head. "We are all aware of the severity of your crime – some of us more than others – and the lack of remorse you have shown for such brutal actions. In addition, there are reports from your detention supervisors that you have elicited a reign of tyranny within the cells. Do you refute these claims?"

This man was arrogant. Alfie hated that. "I refute what you call my 'tyranny', if that's what you mean. If you'd thought to check the records properly, you'll see that every one of the people I 'assaulted' was in the process of hurting another person. There are some terrible people in that place, and you should be ashamed that you-"

"Mr Seabrooke!" Luther interrupted. "May I remind you that you have pled guilty to your charges. There is nothing you can say at this point that will affect the outcome of your trial."

Alfie felt a rage rip through him, white-hot, and he bit back, despite his better judgement. "There are _kids_ in that prison! Harmless, defenceless kids! The worst thing they've ever done is scratch their name into a school desk or look at a guard the wrong way, and BAM, there they are, locked up in prison alongside bullies, murderers, rapists! You think this is an acceptable way to discipline your young? Because I'm here to tell you that you've fucked up, and you've fucked up badly. Your kids are suffering in there, and you should be grovelling at my _feet_ for saving their worthless asses so many times."

He could feel himself rising up from the Death Throne, caught up in his rage. A guard put a firm hand on his shoulder and forced him back to his seat.

The council looked at him in a united silent regard. Disappointment was written across all of their faces. _He was an intelligent, sweet little boy,_ _he had so much potential,_ he could see them all thinking. But none of their pitying looks hurt more than that of his mother's. Julia Seabrooke was barely visible over the high podium at which the council sat. Like most of the equipment on the Ark, it hadn't been built with anyone else in mind but healthy, able-bodied people. In her wheeled chair, Julia looked small next to her counterparts, but Alfie knew she was as fierce as any of them. He kept reminding himself of that even as he saw the shimmer of tears pass briefly over her eyes. Her forehead wrinkled like it used to whenever he returned home to their quarters with a write-up for truancy, or a new curse word he had learned and was eager to yell out in polite company. The sight of her disappointment was too familiar, a wound still too fresh, and he tried instead to stare out the man who was obviously both his judge and his jury.

"Mr Sea-… Alfie," Luther continued, a little more sympathetically this time. "You have considerable anger issues, and a perverse illusion of grandeur that may have reached the point of psychotic delusion. You are a danger to society, and you will not be permitted to walk the halls of the Ark again."

The rage was ebbing and flowing, like waves. With no outlet, no way to punch and kick and spit, he had to sit there, subject to it. He pushed his wrists as far apart as he could in his cuffs, until it hurt, and imagined smashing his fist through that man's obnoxious face.

"If you're going to float me, just do it already," he said, through gritted teeth.

A look passed between the council, along with a few grave nods, and murmurs of approval. The man faced him with an infuriating new smile. "I'm afraid we have other plans for you. Call it a _'revised'_ sentence. Seeing as you obviously have such an insatiable messiah complex, perhaps you'll be pleased to know that your purpose now will be to save the lives of the many right here on the Ark that you obviously care for so deeply. We thank you for your sacrifice. Guards, please continue."

The guards that flanked him turned suddenly, and Alfie saw the flash of a needle in the sharp light. He had half a second to frown at it in confusion, before one of the bastards stepped behind him and pressed him bodily to the Throne. His wrists were clamped to the metal armrests. The needle lingered somewhere by his ear. Alfie thrashed, trying to kick his captor away, before his legs were pinned down too. He tried to move his head, to pull away to safety, but all he saw was a clear, glistening liquid that oozed down the needle's point. Rather than watch it penetrate the taut skin of his neck, he fixed his gaze, for the last time, upon his parents.

"I was arrested for protecting _you_ ," he said to his mother. The tears in her eyes looked just like that serum – despair in liquid form. "I told myself I'd die to defend you. Looks like I got my wish."

The needle broke the skin. His blood was so hot with adrenaline he could almost feel the chill of the serum creeping into his veins. His vision throbbed, his head suddenly felt too heavy to hold up. While he still could, he shot his father a pointed glance, and spoke with a voice that didn't sound like his own. "Thanks for your support, Dad."

His body surrendered then. A haze overcame him, quiet and intoxicating. The pain radiating from the pinprick in his neck dissolved into a blissful nothing. The last thing his mind saw was a flash of a smile and long, yellow hair. _Marlow,_ he called into the darkness. But he was the only one there.


	2. Driftwood

**'Driftwood'**

She was awake even before the sounds began. From the neighbouring cells, she could hear the confusion, the shouting, the clattering of heavy boots on metal floors. She sat cross-legged on her bunk, listening as the chaos drew closer.

When it started, it had begun from three floors down, she was sure of it. Those plated steel walls made any sound easy to trace, if you listened just right. And Marlow Cohen had spent many a long night in the orphanage of the Ark, just listening. The clamour had travelled across the first floor, and begun on the second within the hour. She had waited a long time for them to draw near to her cell in the highest solitary wing, and it had given her plenty of time to prepare. Not that she had needed it. She had only a handful of belongings in that small, bare cell, and she had woken up with them already tucked into her jacket pockets.

A pained shout and a slam of a door told her that they were three cells away. She touched the inside of her jacket for the hundredth time to make sure her deck of cards was still there. She felt them move reassuringly against her fingers, and she took a deep breath to ground herself. If someone had told her a few years ago that she would be sat in Sky Box solitary confinement, about to embark on the greatest journey of her life, she would have laughed them away. No one had believed it, the day she was arrested, and none more so than she.

They were two cells down. A pair of authoritarian footsteps marched past her door, dragging a third pair of feet, lifeless, across the floor.

She checked her back pocket, which held the tools that nice guard had given her, the one who'd taken a shine to her on the day she'd been escorted, smiling, into the prison wing. The tools weren't sharp, but they still served their purpose. They would certainly come in handy where she was going.

A thud came through the walls. They were in the cell next door, and her heart pounded along with the fists of the prisoner they were dragging from its depths. She was vibrating with a serene energy, a feeling of anticipation and excitement that began deep within her bones. Perhaps her body knew somehow that it was going home.

Her door flew open with a crash. They had come for her, just as she knew they would. She rose up to meet them before they'd even hustled their way inside. Two guards approached, their weapons crackling with electricity, and one remained outside the cell, refilling a syringe with an iridescent serum.

Marlow raised her chin to face them as they flanked her on either side.

"Prisoner 510. Marlow Cohen?" the shorter guard barked.

She nodded. "That's as close to my name as you're going to get. So how does this work?"

By way of a response, both of them grabbed her by her upper arms and forced her towards the door. The guard with the needle was flicking the point with a gloved hand. She knew where _that_ was going.

As she emerged out into the sterile lights of the prison corridors, Marlow could see others being dragged from their cells in reflections of her own situation. Except, in the case of the others, there was fear, confusion, and even the occasional act of violent resistance. Those who insisted on the latter were brought swiftly to their knees by a sharp jab of those glistening needles. "Is the tranquilizer really necessary?" she asked.

The stern man with the syringe was already brushing aside her yellow hair to expose the skin of her neck as he said, "All prisoners are to be sedated. Those are the orders."

"Even the prisoners who are prepared to come willingly?"

"No exceptions. Hold her still," he added to his comrades, though she was hardly struggling enough to warrant such a command.

There was a woman on the prison floor, dressed in the uniform of a superior officer. She held a clipboard and was barking orders at the guardsmen, orders which they soon jumped to obey. Marlow gestured towards her and smiled sweetly at the stern man. "Well I'm sure your commander would be pleased to know you're wasting valuable resources on compliant prisoners. How many of those shots will you have left after this? Less than a hundred? I'm sure you're making each one count."

That gave him pause. The men glanced at one another and then in unison at their superior. "Alright." The needle disappeared. "One sign of trouble and I'll break your knuckles."

The thought of that wasn't too appealing, but Marlow wasn't planning on testing his credence in any case. The vice grip on her arms eased off, but they weren't done with her it seemed. In place of the syringe, the man produced a thick metal cuff with a small display and an interior dotted with tiny needles. Wordless, he clamped the bracelet around her right wrist. That, she hadn't been expecting. It pulled her attention for a moment, until the pain began. She briefly wished she'd accepted the sedation - at least then she wouldn't have felt all those tiny points burrowing their way into her skin, melding themselves with her flesh and veins as though they had always been a part of her. A tiny light began to flash on the upside of the wristband to mark its task as complete. It blinked in time with her heartbeat, and watching it quieted her mounting concerns as she was led roughly to the open door of the ship.

Most of the others were already inside, unconscious and strapped to their chairs. She only had a moment to scan the crowd for the face she was hoping to see, before she was wrestled into her own seat, bolted haphazardly to the circular outer wall. The blood-red harness was fastened over her shoulders and across her chest. The seat itself was not made for comfort, and she tried to adjust her position once the guard had walked away, but she was held down too tightly. Everyone in her immediate vicinity was unconscious, all of them sharing the same dosed, dreamless sleep she had so narrowly avoided. Despite the burning in her wrist, she was glad she was awake. She didn't want to miss a moment. The journey she was about to make was one that was dreamt of by almost every inhabitant on the Ark, herself included. For her entire life, she had wished for it, never daring to believe it would actually happen, and yet… here she was. And here _he_ was, somewhere. He wasn't one of the dozing faces around her, but there were other floors on this ship, and no matter what, they would be making this journey together.

The guards that had brought them there soon made a swift exit, and the hiss of sealed air told her that the doors were closing. She peeked around the over-sized headrest on her seat, to steal one last glance at the artificial lights of the space station she knew she would never see again. _No regrets_ , she told herself, and with all her being she meant it.

The silence that fell was a false one. The low thrum of the dropship's engines were a whisper compared to the roar of the Ark's many life support systems and crucial generators, but the hum began deep in the cavernous heart of the ship, and Marlow breathed with it, a long steadying breath to dispel the anticipation of the drop.

Suspended thousands of miles in the higher reaches of nothingness, the capsule full of sleepers released from the belly of its mothership. Finally, the girl everyone called 'Driftwood' was _drifting_ out in space. Her stomach rose as her body fell, and she closed her eyes just long enough to dispel the queasiness. The floor beneath her rattled and shook, and still the dreamers slept on. Being the only one awake to witness their free-fall to Earth made it seem nothing but a fever dream, the kind she remembered having during long, cold nights in the orphanage. There had been no one to comfort her then, either.

One by one, the eyes of the other juveniles began to flutter open. Next to her, a small girl awoke and cried out in fear, a sound echoed by the other unwilling passengers as they felt themselves plummeting through the atmosphere.

"What's going on?" the young girl screamed, turning her huge, questioning eyes on to Marlow.

None of them had been expecting this, not like she had been. She wanted to reassure the girl, but before she had chance to reply, a screen flickered to life high upon the wall. An image of the Chancellor appeared, with an expression of heavy responsibility on his aged face. His voice reverberated around the dropship as his message was played simultaneously on all of the floors.

"Prisoners of the Ark, hear me now: you've been given a second chance. And as your Chancellor it is my hope that you see this as not just a chance for you, but as a chance for all of us, and indeed for mankind itself. This ship is bound for earth."

The shouts that echoed back were a confusion of terror and elation. The girl was afraid, and Marlow reached out to grip her hand as best as she could. Her tiny fingers grabbed back, though her eyes never left the Chancellor's recorded face.

"We have no idea what is waiting for you down there," he continued, gravely. "If the odds of survival were better, we would have sent others. But frankly, we're sending you because your crimes have made you… expendable."

Some of the others seemed indignant, but Marlow was under no illusions. The Ark's attitude to its young criminals was one of the myriad reasons she was happy to leave it behind for good. And she, with no family to protest their treatment of her, was the most expendable of them all.

"If, however, you do survive, then those crimes will be forgiven, your records wiped clean."

That was it. That was what she had been waiting to hear. She cared nothing for her own criminal record – a little civil disobedience would hardly dampen her prospects. But for him, that clause was life-saving. She held on to it in her heart, clung on to it with desperate, hopeful fingers. The others were clamouring too much for her to hear the rest of the pre-recorded message, and she stared hard at his lips to try and read what he was saying. She caught 'base', 'supplies', and what looked like 'Mount Weather', before the shaking of the ship became so intense that it started to disturb the video quality.

"What about all the radiation down there?" the young girl looked to Marlow as though she had all the answers in the world. Tears were running down her rounded cheeks.

"It must have gotten better. Otherwise they wouldn't send us," Marlow lied as hard as she could, and gave the girl's hand another squeeze. "What's your name?"

"Sascha," the girl sobbed, raising her voice to be heard over the chaos around them.

"You're going to be fine, Sascha. We'll _all_ be fine."

A few of the others had managed to get themselves free of their chairs, but their idiocy quickly backfired as the ship hit Earth's atmosphere and accelerated rapidly. The escapees were launched against the walls with a sickening force. Marlow braced herself against the pressure that began to threaten at her skull.

The screen flickered back to life for one final death throe. "Your one responsibility…" the Chancellor's distorted voice commanded. "…stay alive."

With a lurch, the parachutes deployed. The dropship pulled up, and its passengers screamed in unison. Marlow was convinced she was going to be sick. The smell of smoke hit her nostrils and she realised the ship was burning up. An image of fire flashed through her mind and she wished hard for it to be over.

"How much longer?" Sascha cried, sounding pained.

"Not long now. Just a minute," Marlow estimated. As long as the old tin can could stay together for just that long, they would make it. Sparks flew from the ceiling as lights blew. The big screen cracked and spat glass on to the prisoners below. Sascha's grip on her hand felt like it might break her fingers, but she didn't even think about letting go. Hoping against hope, blind to what was happening outside, she pled for safety.

Without warning, the ground met them. The impact made her very bones shake, and her ears rang with the hollow sound of struck metal. The dropship creaked, losing what power remained, and leaned as it settled into the earth.

"Did... did we make it?" Sascha murmured into the uneasy quiet.

Marlow nodded in response, on the brink of disbelief herself. She unfastened her harness slowly, hands aquiver. Sascha seemed even worse for wear, so Marlow reached over to help her do the same.

The risk-takers from earlier unfurled themselves from the walls and floors, hobbling on to broken feet. Some of them didn't get up at all. Marlow's own legs felt like water as he rose from her seat, and for a moment she struggled to find her balance. The descent had been harder on her than she had anticipated.

"Are you alright?" she asked Sascha, crouching carefully to check her over for wounds.

Sascha's brow was damp with sweat and sticky tracks of tears reached down to her chin, but otherwise, she was unharmed. Marlow held out a hand to help her up.

The others rushed by, congregating at the mouth of the large metal door that would lead them to the outside. Marlow heard someone call out a warning about radiation, but they were promptly ignored, the excitement of the group reaching its eager peak. The door was opened, and the light spilled in.

Marlow was forced to shield her eyes right up until she was stood in the huge doorway, the small frame of Sascha at her side. The sunlight was brighter than any of the artificial light she had lived beneath for all of her seventeen years. When she inhaled, she felt like she was breathing for the very first time. The air was so crisp and clean, not recycled and pumped through ancient machinery like she was used to. The other prisoners jostled her as they ran by, and spilled out on to the grass below. She lead Sascha cautiously after them, not knowing where to put her eyes.

Earth had no _start_. It went on infinitely in all directions, running for miles in stretches of verdant green, and reaching up into the true blue of the sky above. There were no ceilings, no walls, nothing to anchor her down in the midst of the beautiful chaos. Every sliver of the ground was unique, its own living, growing life, probably just as complex as hers. Each impossibly tall tree held more history in their wooden bones than Marlow could even comprehend. To think of the Ark after this? It practically formed bile in her throat.

Marlow could never go back.

She stood there taking deep breaths, and just knew – knew that she'd rather die here, have her skin eaten by the very soil and worms beneath her, than return to that excuse of a home. Marlow's lips curled into a smile. _And they said Earth was a wasteland,_ she thought. _Hot radiation, or not - this is better than living where you never belonged._

"Isn't it beautiful, Sascha?" She turned to the young girl, but she was already gone. Marlow caught sight of her half-way down the metal ramp, running into the arms of a much older boy. They seemed more thrilled to see each other than the majestic sights around them. Marlow smiled softly, but she felt a deep ache in her heart.

"If only he was here," she sighed. She couldn't help but imagine him standing beside her right in that moment. If there was anything that could leave him speechless, it was definitely this.

Marlow snapped back to reality. The epiphany of Earth had taken her away for the moment, but then she realised: _he must be here._ Her eyes darted around, a slight doubt in her gut as she scanned past all the unfamiliar faces.

Marlow made quick pace, dipping and sliding between the chaotic crowd of now free criminals. Suddenly her hands were being pulled, and some boy she didn't know was twirling her around and cheering before running off to twirl someone else. Dizzy, she planted her feet in the soil until her vision focused back, the form of a lanky young man emerging from the blurry colors and shapes the world had become. Marlow blinked long and hard. There was only one person who held themselves like that, with an unexplained command of any space he resided in.

Marlow took a few steps closer, and the boy turned. Her blue eyes met his gaze. "Alfie," she said, almost to herself.

He was finally free.


	3. Mother

**'Mother'**

From above, the dropship looked no more than a comet as it sped silently towards Earth. The trail of space dust left in its wake heralded the Ark's only hope. _Mankind's_ only hope. She strained her neck to watch its descent from the tiny porthole set too high in the wall, following the glittering trail until it dropped completely out of sight. Her very heart went with that vessel, and she hastily brushed away a tear as she heard someone enter the room.

"Julia? They're waiting for you."

With a creak of her wheels, Julia turned her chair, donning a deliberate smile to greet her husband, Kevin, and his usual stern expression. If he was at all affected by the events of the day, he wasn't letting them show. He bent down to kneel at her side and take her hand in his. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

She nodded, sweeping her long hair back behind her ears. "We put our own names to the Earth mission. For my own peace of mind, I have to do _something_."

"Where's the Chancellor?" Kevin's thick eyebrows – now streaked with grey over these last few stressful years – knitted together. His mouth was a hard line of suspicion.

"Hiding out in his quarters, I expect," she answered with a soft shake of her head. "I'm sure most of the parents on the Ark are out for his blood."

"Well they shouldn't have to settle for yours."

She let out a gentle laugh at her husband's dark humour. Though they were both prestigious members of the council, Julia was one of two next in line for the Chancellor's position. Kevin was always her most steadfast supporter, even against myriad others who worked for nothing but her failure. And that was why, no matter what awful decisions they had been forced to make, she had to keep her chin up, for him.

"You should go," she told him gently.

He nodded brusquely, brushing his dry lips against her brow before leaving through the quieter rear door.

Julia wheeled her chair over to the opposite door, the exit that lead to the much less private corridor. She took a slow breath before reaching up to activate the door's controls. As it slid aside, the clamour from the crowd was deafening.

"What's going on? What's happening to our children?"

"I saw a ship launch!"

"Let me see my daughter, please…"

"You make me sick!"

Julia held up her hand for silence, and after a few tense moments, the chatter guttered out. The crowd towered above her, but she lifted her head high to look them all in the eyes as she said, "There has been a quarantine situation in the prison. It's an illness that's easily treatable, but we need to contain the spread. Your children are safe."

"What about that ship? How do you explain that?" shouted a furious man wearing the overalls of the factory stations.

"The ship you saw was a test launch of an old escape pod, entirely unrelated," Julia explained, delivering the lie without flinching.

"When will you increase the oxygen supply to Walden again?" asked a pallid young woman at the front of the crowd.

Julia hadn't been prepared for the question, but her responses were rehearsed well enough by now. "Oxygen levels will be restored once air distribution has been stabilised throughout the Ark. We are doing all we can to monitor and-"

"Is that extra oxygen on the back of your chair?" She couldn't see where the voice came from, but the comment hit its mark.

"It's… I have to have this in case-"

"If you weren't on the council, they'd have floated you long ago," a woman near the back called out, and the rest of the crowd roared its agreement.

"How much medication have you taken from medical in the last few months?"

"My mother is in lots of pain, they won't give her anything to help her."

"You're a waste of resources!"

Julia's chest tightened painfully. "I have to go. Excuse me," she said through a burning throat, before unlocking her wheels and pushing herself away from the ravenous crowd. A few of the braver protestors tried to block her path, but the guards soon forced them back into line. Moving between the ranks of armed men and women, Julia pushed herself far enough out of sight before launching into a vicious bout of racking coughs. Each one felt like a wound in her chest, and her eyes welled over with bitter tears. She fumbled behind her headrest for her oxygen mask.

One of the guards must have seen her struggling, and put it into her hand. "Ma'am? Do you need to go to medical?"

She shook her head rapidly and sucked in that first blessed lungful of oxygen. Her throat freed and her breathing steadied. "I'm going… to see the Chancellor," she said, between inhalations.

"Would you like me to push you there?"

"No," she answered, a little too sharply. "No, I'll be… fine. Thank you."

She didn't want to spend a moment longer gasping for air in front of all those people, and she wheeled herself away perhaps sooner than she would have liked to. Fortunately, the journey to Chancellor Dawson's quarters was mercifully short. She went in alone.

Nathaniel Dawson stood at one of the wide windows on his office, dark eyes cast Earth-ward as though he had been watching the dropship's descent himself. An open bottle of ancient whiskey sat on his desk.

"A toast to the travellers?" Julia asked, feeling more human now she was behind closed doors.

Nathaniel turned to face her, looking almost surprised that she was there. He shook his head solemnly and resumed his melancholy stare out of the window.

She let him have just a heartbeat of silence before she said, "The people have questions. Apparently the dropship's launch didn't go unnoticed."

"I trust you to deal with them, Julia."

"I _have_ tried to deal with them, Nathaniel. It degraded into name-calling, yet again. You really need to speak to Luther about keeping his personal grudges to himself."

"Luther is a member of this council. He is free to do as he please," the Chancellor responded in a monotone voice.

"Even if that includes jealously slandering his fellow council members?"

He turned to look at her then, deep lines wrinkling his forehead. His salt-and-pepper hair was a shock against his nut-brown skin, and his back was bowed no matter how straight he stood. But despite the toll time had taken upon him, he was still the most dignified man on the Ark. The look he gave her was one of disapproval. "Don't we have more important things to deal with right now?"

"Yes, and some of us realise that more than most."

"I have a son down there, you know," he rebutted.

"One of your many wild oats, yes. I do feel for you, but come and talk to me about loss when the person you're grieving for is your only son."

"The last I heard, you were denying that he was even your son at all."

The silence lay thick between them. Julia had no fear in meeting his judging gaze, and eventually, he relented, walking slowly back to the seat behind his desk. "What would you have me do?"

"Your people – _talk_ to them. They deserve to know the truth, the parents especially. It can't come from me, or Kevin, or even Luther. It's to you they look for answers, and this… this is heavy news, for every citizen of the Ark. Just tell them the truth, that's all I'm asking of you."

As she spoke, he refilled his glass with whiskey – a luxury more precious than oxygen these days. He watched each amber drop hit the glass, and when he drank, he did so intensely. "That's all, hm?" he said eventually, placing the empty glass back on the desk. "Give me a day. I'll think on it."

"As you wish, Chancellor," Julia said, frustrated but willing to concede him that much. She released her brakes to leave, but she only managed one full turn of her wheels before he called out to her.

"Your son," he said, and a pang went through her. "He'll be fine. He's with the girl, isn't he?"

She let out a long, painful breath. "That's what I'm worried about." She reached the door and remembered herself. Beyond that door, she had a façade to wear, and she would wear it at her husband's insistence. She cast one last look at Nathaniel over her shoulder before she left the room. "Besides, it's just as you say: he's not my son any more."


	4. The Pyro

**'The Pyro'**

People were still surging out from the doors of the dropship behind him, but Alfie stayed firm. Some of the teens who jostled past him were jubilant, whooping and dancing in the moving lights that shimmered through the canopy of trees above. Others were still dazed, either from the tranquilizer or the crash, it didn't matter which. They moved slowly, deliberately, running a hand against each bark and knotted root they passed for support.

Alfie was locked inside his own private euphoria as he regarded the new world that surrounded him. This level of feeling was something he never experienced in his life, not even all the times he was bundled off to solitary, bloodied and triumphant. He breathed long and deep, forcing his eyes to focus on the dazzling greens of the forest. He had never seen such _colour_ before…

Except he had, on one person in particular. A shining head of yellow brushed against his peripheral vision, and for half a second he thought it might be her. Then the crowd moved again, and he saw her face, for real and true.

"Drift," he meant to call, but instead, half-whispered.

It was as though she had heard him all the same. Suddenly she was saying his name. Then she was running to him, and her arms folded around his back to grip him into the first hug he'd had in years. It was a closeness he hadn't realised he missed until that moment. When she retreated, it was with a wild grin on her face. "You better watch out. I heard someone got themselves thrown into solitary for a week. I think they're trying to compete with you."

Seeing Marlow here on the ground was like seeing her in hyper-real, extra-sharpened technicolour. He was so used to her figure being distorted by the smudged reinforced glass of the visitation room. Without that barrier, she appeared like a dream – the kind of dream that could catch him unawares and pull him into a rib-crushing hug. He was too stunned by both her reappearance and the sudden physical contact to react as she grabbed him. Her jibe was what finally brought him back, a broad grin spreading across his face as he regarded her. Her warm, easy attitude was as welcome to him as the fresh air of their new, green planet.

"Well it sure as hell wasn't you, was it, Miss Marlow Squeaky-Clean Driftwood?"

She rolled her eyes at his remark, and cupped her face with her hands, all exaggerated innocence. "Hm, I don't know. Though how can you be so sure? Maybe I finally cracked, just like they all said I would, finally unlocking my witch powers. If there's a broom anywhere around here, I'll show you some flying tricks."

They laughed together, like they hadn't in years. Behind that glass, she had seemed a world away. She might as well have been a recording from old Earth television, a fleeting moment long since captured that he could view over and over but no longer affect. Nothing he could do from inside his small cell would change the repeating image of the girl behind the glass, the colour and life sapped from her with each passing day, as the footage eroded and feelings grew stagnant. He never wanted to see the smile he saw now erased from her face, but he had a difficult question they both knew he had to ask.

"Where have you been?" He tried not to think of the day she hadn't come, when he sat waiting in the visitation room, staring hard through that empty glass. The picture had gone, faded as it was. "Wait… what did you do?"

Marlow scratched the back of her neck, looking sheepish. "Yeah, I'm sorry I disappeared without a word. I didn't mean to leave you hanging like that. I knew about all this," she explained, gesturing to their new, lush environment. Then she pointed at the dropship behind them. "And that. I didn't tell you because I wasn't sure how much time there was. I had to work fast in case… you know, you left without me. As for what I did… I disturbed the peace a bit, gave the kids a few new words to add to their vocabulary before their bedtime. And then I gave the guard that right hook you showed me." She swung her fist, painting the picture for him.

He couldn't help but let a wolfish grin spread across his face. Seeing her now, so very much herself, so very _Marlow_ -like was like watching all his best childhood memories play out before his eyes. After all, she had been a part of every one of them. He wanted to be mad at her for getting herself into trouble, but in truth, he was nothing but proud. She had figured out something even he had missed, finding out about the dropship plans like she had. And more than that, she had actually found a way to come here, against all odds, for no other reason than to be at his side again. What else should he have expected from the brilliant mind of his one-time rival?

"You keep on surprising me, Drift." He hooked a slender arm around her shoulders, more grapple than a hug. "Come on, let's go find you that broomstick."

"Alfie! Hey!"

He turned his head sharply, Marlow's following just behind. Someone was running their way, though it took him a moment of squinting against the strange Earth sunlight to recognise their face. "Will? What's wrong?"

The desperate expression of Willard Dawson approached, his feet kicking up soil as he ran. In one hand, he clutched a large roll of paper. The crowd he pushed through followed his trail with judgemental stares. Alfie knew those looks well; they were the kind that everyone gave the sons and daughters of the council, whether they were fellow prisoners or not. It was obvious that the Chancellor's son elicited the worst of their hatred. Oblivious, Will nodded a greeting and slammed the paper on to the metal ramp of the dropship. As he unrolled it, it proved to be a map.

Marlow peered over Alfie's shoulder as he tried to make sense of the complex lines and markers. "What is it?"

"We're here," Will said, between short breaths, his finger jabbing at a tall, illustrated mountain peak.

"Right," Alfie's thick eyebrows knitted as he tried to wrap his head around what Will was getting at. The other boy was agitated, that much was obvious. That could only mean that something was wrong. "And we're not supposed to be?" He offered, trying to prompt him along.

"No," Marlow said, a deep frown on her face. She reached around him to point at another, larger peak a hand-span away. "That's Mount Weather. According to the Chancellor's transmission on the dropship, that's where we're supposed to be."

Willard's curious glance at her only lasted half a heartbeat, before he nodded his agreement. "That's right. I mean, we have rations, basic equipment, but everything we need for long term survival…"

"Is twenty miles away," Alfie finished, gravely.

Will nodded once again, sharing an anxious look with a dark-haired young girl who had arrived alongside him. She had been so quiet that Alfie had entirely missed her. A small memory in the back of his mind reminded him that she was Sascha, Will's half-sister.

Alfie could see the problem, but to him the solution seemed obvious. "So we form a party, go to the mountain, retrieve the supplies. Simple."

"What about everyone else?" Will asked, his voice a panicked octave higher than usual. Alfie liked the guy well enough, but he did have a tendency to over-react.

"They stay here," he shrugged. "We can't travel at the speed of a hundred all the way to the mountain. It's a known fact that a herd can only go as fast as its slowest member, and most of ours are wounded."

"Alfie's right," Marlow said, casting her blue eyes around the milling crowd of juveniles. "Speed is of the essence. We can go."

Alfie followed Marlow's gaze, out to the thick wall of people that surrounded them. From the agitation that seemed to be building in their midsts, it was obvious that something was happening. A few fingers were pointed skyward, followed by the clamour of someone beating sheet metal, and the attraction quickly revealed itself.

"Listen up!" A head of red hair stood like a beacon against the metallic background of the dropship. The voice belonged to Jareth Dukes, or – as he was more commonly known – The Pyro. He wore the nickname like a badge of honour, after being arrested for arson attempts in a highly populous sector of the Ark. "This is how it's gonna be. I get that we're all excited to be here, but shit's gotta get done. I need volunteers for tent-building and handing out rations."

The crowd murmured its uneasy response. Alfie and Marlow exchanged a look.

"If someone don't volunteer, I'm gonna have to choose teams myself, and you'll be doing the same job but with broken fingers. So who's up?"

A few people stepped forward, with nervous looks on their faces. But Will wasn't so easily cowed.

"You can't threaten people like that!"

The Pyro's hot green eyes bore down on him. "Oh look everyone! It's the Chancellor of Earth! Come to see how the little people live?"

There was laughter, and Will reddened, retreating back two paces. Alfie stepped out in front of him, meeting The Pyro's glare directly. "Jareth, if you're naming yourself our leader, there's something you should know."

"And here's the Vice-Chancellor!" The Pyro smirked, gesturing for everyone to heed Alfie's words. "What's up, Seabrooke? You and your little council got some business for the masses?"

Anyone who dared laugh that time was quickly silenced by a short sharp glare from Alfie. "Our landing was miscalculated. The rations and supplies we have are only enough to last us until we reach the Mount Weather base. And Mount Weather…" Alfie turned to point at the peak on the horizon. "…is over there."

"What's your point?" The Pyro shouted down, obviously bored with the conversation already.

Alfie sighed with exasperation, but Marlow said, in a loud yet even voice, "We need those supplies if we want to survive. The rations from the dropship will only last so long."

"Have you looked around, blondie?" their self-imposed leader asked. "We're surrounded by forest. We're not running out of _anything_. Mother Nature's got it all right here. No, we gotta stay tight, set up camp, get things-"

"There's weapons," Marlow blurted, and Alfie glared at her. "You're not hoping to find guns growing on trees are you? Or harvest grenades from a field?"

The Pyro heard that. Alfie saw his greedy mind snatch the idea, and it gobble it whole. "Drift's right," Alfie nodded. "Who knows what's waiting out there for us? We need to defend ourselves."

"Right. So you think we should leave camp, against all this danger that may or may not be out there, unarmed. Sounds like suicide. Who's stupid enough to agree to that?"

"We are," Alfie replied, unyielding. "Marlow and I, we'll take some rations and we'll be back by sunset tomorrow, weapons and food included."

"We're going too," Will suddenly announced, in a voice not quite loud enough to travel. But his step forward, with Sascha's hand in his, was clear enough.

The Pyro laughed, long and loud. "The Chancellor of Earth's gonna do my dirty work? Well, this I gotta see. Get what you need and get outta here. Tent team, meet me in the storage hold, pronto!"

Once Jareth had descended and the crowd had dispersed, Alfie turned to Will with a scowl. "You know this is dangerous, don't you? We don't have any idea what we might run into down there. Both you and her… you could die. You understand that, right?"

Will nodded, his expression grave. "I'd rather face whatever's out there than stay here with the likes of The Pyro. We're the Chancellor's relatives, they'll kill us without you two here to fight our corner."

Sascha almost sounded confident as she said, "We'll be okay."

Alfie didn't much appreciate the idea of being slowed down by tag-alongs. He would have preferred to go alone, or with Marlow at a push, but he couldn't deny that Will was right – some of their previous cellmates were violent and thirsty for blood, and he wouldn't have the lives of the two of them hanging over his head.

"Fine. It's your decision," he conceded, turning away from his newly-assembled team. "Grab only what you need. We're leaving right now."


	5. The Nature of Nature

**'The Nature of Nature'**

Walking away from the camp while The Pyro was in charge left a bad taste in Will's mouth, but as they stepped out properly into the untouched forest, it was hard to worry too much.

Will was so busy staring up at the canopy of shifting colours in the leaves that he missed the tree root that snagged hold of his foot and jerked him, sprawling, to the dirt. Alfie made a disapproving sound and strode away, brandishing the vicious piece of scrap metal he had scavenged from the dropship in lieu of a weapon. But in half a heartbeat, Marlow had turned back to help him.

"Thanks, Driftwood," Will said, as he took her outstretched hand.

He had been testing the waters, but she hardly flinched at the nickname. No small wonder, when she'd been carrying it her entire life, he remarked inwardly. He knew the name was supposed to be an insult, some jibe about how she was the Driftwood left behind by her floated parents, but she had worn the name so well and for so long that it was hard to think of her as anything else. She offered him a tight smile, and strode away after Alfie, looking like she might just try to scold him. Better her than me, he thought. Alfie had never been hostile towards Will personally, but he was well known for his aggression. That, and the fact that his councillor parents had practically disowned him upon his incarceration. The kid he was arrested for beating up had to have a metal plate in his _jaw_. Staring at the back of Alfie's blonde head, Will suppressed a shudder.

"Are you okay?" Sascha fussed almost immediately. "Are you hurt? I can-"

"Sash, I'm fine," he reassured her. He'd skinned his knees as he fell, but they didn't hurt worse than his pride. There was nothing more pathetic than a team member who couldn't carry his own weight, and he was determined not to be that person.

His sister seemed entirely at peace with the dangerous trek to Mount Weather, and her mood only improved as they walked through the beauty of the woods. Her small hands touched every tree they passed, and occasionally she stopped to smell the prettiest of the nearby flowers.

"Wait!" he cried out once, as her face neared a giant purple bloom with a toxic green centre. He grabbed her shoulder, pulling her away to a safe distance. "Some of these plants are poisonous, you've got to be careful."

Sascha shrugged him off, smiling a smile he'd more than missed. "I've been looking after myself for the last two years, Will. I'm fine."

"That was back on the Ark," he countered. "Here there's danger around every shrub."

She actually laughed. Now the fear was wearing off, she was returning to her fiery old self quicker than he had hoped. Returning to Earth had reawakened the _real_ Sascha, and not the young girl harried down by hunger and phobia that he'd come to know. "Oh right, and I guess spending two years on my own in the Sky Box was just daycare," she said. "I'm tougher than you think."

He fell quiet, staring intently at the damp lichen as he picked his way over it, carefully. "I'm sorry I wasn't there to protect you."

"When are you gonna learn your lesson? It was trying to protect me that got you thrown in the cells in the first place."

He was spared trying to think of a rebuttal when he saw Alfie gesturing up ahead. The two of them had fallen far behind, and Will couldn't see what the other boy was getting at, until he ducked suddenly behind a tree. Marlow did the same, dropping to her knees behind a bush. Panicked, Will dragged Sascha down to a crouch.

"Hey!" she protested, and Will put a gentle hand over her mouth. Suddenly she looked afraid again, as afraid as _he_ felt, cowering from an unknown threat in unfamiliar territory. Alfie was the only one with a weapon, as crude as it was, and despite his record of violence, could he really be counted on to protect them?

"What's happening?" Sascha asked in a desperate whisper.

Will was shaking his head in reply when Marlow motioned for them to come closer. Sharing a frightened look with Sascha, both of them crept forward, inch by steady inch. Will's heart was beating at twenty times the pace of their footsteps, and it drummed ever harder as they drew closer to Marlow's hiding place.

"Look," she half-breathed. Her finger, quivering with excitement, pointed out into the clearing before them.

Amidst the tangled foliage, grazing on the tall, swaying grass, was a deer. Will had only ever seen pictures of such a creature, but as with all things, the reality was much more breath-taking. The stag's magnificent antlers were bowed to the ground, and it remained blissfully unaware of their presence.

Alfie edged silently around the tree, and the spell was broken. His weapon was raised.

"What are you doing?" Marlow hissed.

Alfie shrugged. "It's food. Kill it now and the whole camp will be fed for a week."

"No!" Sascha protested a little too loudly. The stag raised its head sharply, its ears pricked for danger. Collectively, they held a breath, waiting to see if it would bolt. After a moment, it ducked its head back to the grass and continued to graze.

"The radiation…" Will said at last. "If animals have survived, Earth must be inhabitable."

"So we won't all die slowly in our sleep," Alfie said, putting his weapon away bitterly. "Excellent news."

"Sascha," Marlow called over, softly. "You ever wanted to meet a deer?"

"Wait, Sash-"

"Don't worry, Will. It won't hurt us," Marlow reassured him, holding out a hand for Sascha to take. She grasped it eagerly, rising slowly to Marlow's side. The two girls stepped out into the clearing together.

Will's heart beat a frantic rhythm against his ribs as they approached the animal on feather-light footsteps. If the deer was alarmed by their presence, it didn't show it. He couldn't see Sascha's face from his position crouched behind a bushel, but he could imagine the wonder lighting up her eyes with startling clarity. The moment was a full one – full of hope for their new yet ancient home, full of all the beauty the young juveniles had yet to discover. Their new world was bright and full of wonder, but most importantly, it was _theirs_.

Antlers shot up into the air as the deer finally locked eyes with the girls. Marlow stopped, and with a gentle push at her back, urged Sascha forward. The tiny twelve-year old stepped closer, with grace and purpose, her hand softly outstretched. The deer leaned, dipping its head to sniff softly at her fingers. The gesture held for a staggering moment, and Sascha reached out to touch the beast right upon its muzzle.

A whistle of air. Sascha screamed. The deer stumbled and fell to its side with a sickening thud and a screeching cry. Blood spattered Sascha's arms, and Marlow's jacket as she reached out to pull the younger girl away. Both of them turned and ran. Behind them, Will could see the feathered fletch of an arrow poking up from between the stag's ribs.

Alfie was faster, and was on his feet before Will had noticed the second arrow. This time, it shot in their direction. "Let's go!" Alfie called, spurring the girls onwards as the arrow whistled over Marlow's head. "Come on!"

Once Sascha had broken the first line of trees, Will scrambled desperately upright, and as one, the four of them bolted for cover of the trees.

"Who's firing at us?" Will called breathlessly, keeping desperate pace with his sister.

"Not one of ours," Marlow replied, ducking as another arrow whizzed past her shoulder. "We don't have arrows."

"That means there's someone else here?" Will's lungs burned as he shouted, but the panic made him numb to the pain.

"Stop talking about it and _run_!" Alfie called over his shoulder. He charged ahead with arrows falling at his heels.

The ground was littered with pitfalls – one false step and a tree or root or vine could send them sprawling. A fall meant an arrow in the back, and none of them risked looking over their shoulders for fear of tumbling.

The arrows came thick and fast, despite the cover of the trees, and Will decided that whoever was behind the bow knew the woods well. All the scenery looked the same, every tree, every bush, every pitiful stream of water. He couldn't say if they were running back to the safety of the camp, but he prayed with all his might that they were.

A shout, and Sascha stumbled. Will travelled a few paces before stopping short to pull her up. He felt a sharp pain in his shoulder from the manoeuvre, but her safety was more important. She scrambled to her feet before he reached her, and she looked up at him with tears of terror welling in her eyes. She had stopped, and he wanted to urge her on, this wasn't the time to stop – but his words were robbed from him by another stab in his shoulder. He looked down, finally seeing what Sascha was staring at with those huge, scared eyes. The point of an arrow was poking from beneath his collar bone, wearing a grisly coat of his blood and flesh. Glancing back, he saw the feathering of the bolt protruding a handspan out of his shoulder. He wanted to scream but the world felt like water and it drowned out his cry. He pictured blood filling up his lungs and choked desperately on air. Sascha was pulling him, pulling him, but it hurt and he couldn't go on. Marlow was back, even Alfie too. They'd stopped running. Why had they stopped running?

He urged them on, no words forming, so he tried instead with a gesture.

Marlow was gripping his good arm. "The arrows have stopped, Will. But we don't know for how long. I need you to walk – can you do that?"

He tried a step and nearly collapsed. Alfie caught him under his arm and took his weight. With Marlow guiding him on the other side, they began to lead him back through the forest. Sascha was somewhere nearby, sobbing.

Their voices felt like wind beneath all the pain, but he heard them without even trying to.

"We have to get him back to camp," Marlow was saying.

"And lead them right back to our base? I don't think so," Alfie countered.

"Alfie, listen to me. He's losing blood and I'm no medic. If we don't get him back to camp, he's going to die. Do you want that on your conscience?"

Alfie growled with frustration, but he didn't protest any more. Will could do nothing but rest against them, trusting them to guide him home. Or to camp, but weren't they one and the same now? But if this was someone else's home, someone who would fire arrows at them unprovoked, could it really be _their_ home too? His brain felt like it was pressing against his skull, and the vivid greens of the forest span violently round and round. Then he saw the smoke from the cooling dropship, and with a wave of relief, passed out.

* * *

 _2 years ago…_

His stomach was growling, but still he pushed his plate away, still laden with food.

"May I be excused?"

He was met with dark looks from both sides of the table. His father actually found it in him to look offended, as though he'd slaved away cooking this meal himself.

"You can wait," Nathaniel Dawson replied. "Eat."

Will picked at his leftovers obediently, turning each morsel over and over on his fork before taking small, reluctant bites. He chewed them relentlessly, each mouthful making him feel all the more guilty. There were fresh vegetables on all of their plates, and _meat_ – precious and expensive stock, these days.

"You were saying, Luther?" The Chancellor gestured to the man sat to his right.

Luther took a long drink of wine before replying. The silence gave Will enough time to wonder why they had to keep having this man over for dinner. "Just that this is a matter we should perhaps pay closer attention to. I can't deny what I saw. These machines don't just throw random numbers into the air for no reason."

"But you're telling me that one of your apprentices discovered this fault," his father replied, his words slurring slightly. "How can you be sure this isn't the kind of mistake one makes during the early days of learning a trade?"

It sounded to Will like his father was looking for any excuse to discredit Luther's story. Whatever that story was – Will had been too distracted to care as the councillor spoke. Everything that came out of Luther's mouth seemed nothing more than sweetly-coated venom. He was determined to poison the Chancellor's thoughts by getting him to ingest all this charmingly-worded hyperbole. _And my father's stupid enough to buy it_ , he thought.

"I have faith in my workers," Luther continued, settling his knife and fork down upon his empty plate. "Not everyone is as woefully unskilled as young Willard here."

Will didn't give them the time to see him blush. "I'll clear the table," he said, jumping up from his chair and gathering the plates as quickly as he could.

He burst into the kitchen with his hands clutching too tightly at the cutlery. There was a murmur of laughter from the dining room, and Will knew his father hadn't leapt to his defence. But there was no time to dwell on that. He had to work quickly.

Folding out a piece of wrapping, he gently began to transfer the scraps of food inside it. His mouth watered as he touched the russet skin of the potatoes. They were his favourite comfort food, and the most frequent product of the agricultural station. But their price was still high, and he handled them like jewels as he folded the wrapping closed. Luther and his father had cleared their plates of course. They ate this luxurious food without a second thought, not even a moment of contemplation for how lucky they were not to be sucking up protein packs for nutrition like the rest of the Ark. He glanced over his shoulder uneasily when he heard someone stir from the table. He jammed the food parcel down his sweater.

Sure it was safe, Will opened the cupboards and stuffed the contents into his pockets. He made some deliberate noise with the faucet so they might think he was actually cleaning.

They were engrossed in their conversation when he slipped back into the main living area, and he thought he might have escaped their notice altogether. He was two steps away from freedom when he heard his father's voice call out, "Is this really the time to be going out, Willard?"

"I still have an hour before curfew."

"And are you going to tell me what you're getting up to on these nightly excursions of yours?"

Will pretended that he hadn't heard, though it was impossible not to. "I'll be back soon," he called as he slipped out of the door. He caught a few condescending words from Luther about how he would have raised his son to respect rules and follow orders – if he had ever had any children.

Out in the corridor, he faced a new problem: the guards. Not that they ever had much reason to stop the Chancellor's son, but if they caught him now, the game would surely be up. They could search him for whatever they wanted on his return journey, but he could not afford to let that happen now.

He tried to look as inconspicuous as possible as he passed the stern guards that were always posted at the end of their corridor. _The Chancellor's Honour Guard_ , some had taken to calling them. Perhaps if his father focused on making more popular choices for the people he wouldn't need protecting from them.

One of the guards nodded to Will as he passed, and he breathed a sigh of relief once he'd rounded the corner and was safely away from their intrusive staring. Then he broke into a brisk stride. He didn't have long to get to the other side of the Ark, but he knew the shortcuts well. He had been making this journey night after night for some time now. He only wished he could make it more often.

His destination was always the same – a little-used corridor near the agricultural zone, on the outskirts of the sectors recently declared as poverty-stricken. He touched the wrapped potatoes in his pocket, battling with a sense of irony. The potatoes had been grown here and whisked away from the mouths of the poor, right before their eyes, to land instead on his plate. And here he was, returning them. If he could somehow bring back _all_ the food that left this place, he would. But for now, there was only one person who he could afford to worry about.

She waited for him where she always did. The room was small, probably once a store for tools, but it stood empty these days. Will slipped inside. It took his eyes a moment to acclimatise to the low lighting, and for a moment he was blind.

A little voice came from the darkness, and saved him the trouble. "Will."

He smiled in greeting as Sascha's small, gaunt frame drew up beside him. "Sorry I took so long. Did anyone see you come?"

"They never do." Whenever Sascha smiled, it didn't quite reach her eyes. He stared at her for a long time as her body came into focus. Her wrists were looking thinner – was that even possible since yesterday? Her legs were like two strings, and he could see her cheekbones when she turned her head. She shuffled uncomfortably under his gaze. "Um, I'm sorry to rush you, but…"

"Oh, right!" Will exclaimed, remembering himself. He shuffled in his pockets for the food parcel. No sooner had he given it to her than she had sank to the floor, unwrapping it with shaking hands.

"Potatoes," she said, dreamily. Her amazement didn't last long when stacked up against her hunger. She ate in handfuls, sucking the remnants of potato from underneath her fingernails between each bite. Will's stomach growled obviously as he watched her.

She looked up at him with surprise at the noise, and gestured towards him. "Here. They're your favourite, aren't they?"

"Yes, but… no, Sascha. I've had enough. _Eat_ , please."

"Just one. It can even be the smallest one. Go on."

He had learned quickly that the pleading look in his sister's eyes was hard to resist. He sat down carefully beside her, trying not to move too fast in case the lower oxygen levels caused him to falter. Gratefully, he took the smallest potato from the parcel. "Thank you."

They ate in companionable silence, in the darkness of the old room. Will savoured his food as best as he could. Splitting all his meals in half was taking its toll on him too, but he was older, stronger. He could deal with the effects better than little Sascha could. On her worse days, he had seen her sway on her feet, light-headed from hunger. A little gnawing in his stomach was nothing compared to that.

Without warning, she suddenly started wrapping the food back up, unfinished.

"What are you doing? You should eat more."

"I'm taking them back for my mom," Sascha explained, though she looked grudging in her compassion. "She fainted again yesterday. I don't know if it was the air or the hunger, but she needs to eat."

"Finish the potatoes," Will said, sternly. Sascha looked as though she might try to argue, until he turned his pockets inside out, littering the floor with stolen ration packs. "I brought these for your mother. Neither of you are going to go hungry while I'm around."

Sascha's smile spread slowly across her face as she looked over the collection of food at her feet. For a second, Will was sure he even saw a glint of happiness in her eyes. She reopened the potatoes without a word, and ate again. Will could feel in himself the warmth that filled her with each bite. He found himself wishing he could somehow reverse their positions. But even if he could, would he? Sascha might be hungry but at least she had her mother. If food were love, he would be famished. Though they shared the same father, Will couldn't wish him upon her, not truly.

He was woken from his reverie when Sascha rested her head against his shoulder, the empty wrapping clutched tight in her fist. "I know no one else has a big brother, but if they did… you would still be the best one."


	6. Eden Hall

**'Eden Hall'**

The panoramic view of Earth from Eden Hall was usually a beautiful sight. Today, it served as nothing more than a grim reminder of evils done in the name of humanity.

Julia was on the front row of the audience, in the only place her wheelchair would fit – crammed awkwardly between the lines of occupied seats. The hall was full to bursting, with those who couldn't fit inside left to watch the address on their own personal screens.

With Earth as his backdrop, a lone man stood before the citizens of the Ark. Standing authoritatively at a podium, hands clasped in the small of his back, he spoke with a confidence only a trained liar could muster.

"And so I am here to dispel the poisonous rumours that have been circulating here since yesterday morning. The prisoners – your children – are safe."

There was a murmur in the crowd, and the man who was not their Chancellor had to raise his voice to be heard above the clamour.

"The Sky Box is on lockdown as a precautionary measure, to contain a medical anomaly. The condition is not life-threatening but is highly contagious, and we need to contain its spread. Once the illness has been eradicated, you will be permitted to see your children as usual."

Julia's eyes never left her fellow councillor's face. The fact that the Chancellor would continue to lie about the Earth mission was irresponsible enough – to hide behind someone else to do it was beyond despicable. And of course Luther had been the obvious choice for an avatar, with his lofty ambitions and skewed sense of morality. If Nathaniel had posed the speech to _her_ , she would have been incredulous.

"Of course, there is one issue from yesterday I have yet to address: the pod that was seen leaving the docking bay around the time the quarantine was put into effect."

Julia could still see the trail of debris the dropship had left behind, leaving an arch of dust and detritus that swept sharply behind Luther's back. There was no denying the existence of the ship, and it was an enormous misnomer in the Chancellor's story. She leaned forward slightly, eager to hear his mouthpiece's duplicitous explanation.

"Yes, a ship _was_ launched, and indeed on authority of the council. The blame, however, can only be placed on one of my peers – the same council member whose criminal son reached the age of majority yesterday. The same council member whose son was sentenced to be floated at the trial generously granted to him by law. The same council member who smuggled her son on to an escape pod to save him from that same, well-deserved sentence. I'm sure you're all aware of who I am talking about."

Julia felt eyes on her, chased with whispers of her name, her son's name. She became acutely aware of guards rising up from every side of the hall. Too many, too armed.

"Julia," Luther was smiling down upon her with a pitying expression. The mask he wore was so brittle she thought it might just crumble off his face. "You've done many a disservice to the people of the Ark in your time of service, but this has been by far your worst offence. Not only do you place priority on yourself for additional oxygen, pain relief and medication, but you also put the life of your son, a convicted criminal, above the lives of all the innocent children and families aboard the Ark."

The guards were circling. The murmurs were bubbling over, growing to shouts and heckles, and still the lies kept coming.

"The supplies you smuggled out with your son were enough to feed the population of Alpha Station for a month. This was a heinous crime that has only one, inevitable conclusion. Julia Seabrooke, on behalf of the council and Chancellor Dawson, I sentence you to death."

The crowd were all around her, even the very walls seemed to move. Someone was in her face, yelling about theft and the death of hundreds. Her chest tightened, and she instinctively reached for her oxygen mask. _No. Not now._

Busying her hands instead with the wheels of her chair, she fumbled off the brakes with shaking hands. She fought her way through the screaming faces to get to the front. There was no ramp up to the stage, so she positioned herself below it.

"Everyone, please!" Julia raised her voice as loud as she dared. The guards were drawing closer. Though their progress was blocked by the angry mob, her time was still precious. "Yes, my son Alfie was on that ship. But he wasn't alone." Some people shushed others, and the quiet slowly spread. "Aboard the ship were ninety-nine other young criminals – your children, your grandchildren. Their destination is Earth."

The crowd erupted. Somewhere behind her, Luther was demanding for her to stop, but she couldn't now.

"This is a mission, to test Earth's suitability." She was shouting and her lungs seized horribly. _Not now_ , she told them sternly. "You see, we are running out of time. The Ark's oxygen reserves are running low, and what Luther is trying to do by pointing the finger at me is draw your attention away from the fact that our days here are numbered."

The guards grabbed hold of her arms on either side but she did not even try to struggle. Someone tried to pull a guard away from her but was swiftly beaten away by five others.

"He might be able to float me, but he can't keep you away from the truth: the Ark is dying!"

"Councillor Seabrooke! Just what is going on here?"

A deep, booming voice from the hall's entrance made everyone turn their heads. There stood the Chancellor, looking half-sober for once. There was a sudden silence.

She lifted her head high to answer him. "Councillor Conway was just having me arrested, Chancellor."

"On what grounds?"

"For telling the truth, sir."

Luther looked like he was biting back a retort. "She has compromised the Earth mission, sir. She has broadcast the plans without-"

"You mean she has done precisely as I asked _you_ to do?" Nathaniel gave him a cutting look. "Guards, release Councillor Seabrooke."

The angry crowd were quick to turn on the Chancellor, but he silenced them with a swift motion. The mob parted for him as he walked to the podium though there were still hisses of derision in his wake.

"What Julia says is true," the Chancellor said, into the palpable silence. "I had asked Councillor Conway to deliver this news to you, but apparently he decided that lying was a far better option. Rest assured that he will be reprimanded for his actions." Luther shrank back into the shadows, though his face showed no sign of remorse.

"Who cares about the Council?" someone shouted. "What about our kids?"

"Are we really going to die here?"

"Please," Nathaniel raised a hand once more. This was the most composed Julia had seen him in years. _This_ was the man she had grown to respect during her time in civil service, not the shrinking, aged drunk he was these troubled days. "You have questions, and I only have some of the answers. Unfortunately, we have very little contact with the party on the ground thanks to the communication system being damaged upon landing. But, what we can do it monitor their vital signs. As long as those vital signs remain stable, we can assume the Earth is inhabitable. However, we need time to ensure the radiation isn't having a slow effect."

"How much time?"

"We can't hang around waiting if we're running out of air!"

"How long do we have?"

"Four months, at best," the Chancellor said, gravely.

Julia could sense the panic. It gripped her too, but not in the same way she worried about those children down on the ground. What they were facing was in some ways worse than a simple shortage of oxygen, and it pained her to think of the choices they were being forced to make – of the choices _Alfie_ was being forced to make. She could remember so clearly the day that Kevin had burst into their quarters in a hot rage to tell her that their son had been arrested. She had cried that day how she had cried every day since – secretly, away from where her husband could see. The circumstances of Alfie's incarceration had haunted her ever since. After all, it had really been her fault. And now he was down there, on Earth, and she was still as powerless to protect him as she ever was.

The Chancellor was still fielding desperate questions from the people and Julia managed to slip out of the hall unnoticed. After the pressure of the crowd in the cramped space, to be out in the empty halls of the corridor felt like a breath of fresh air itself. As she moved like a spectre through the deck, she saw groups of people huddled around communal screens to hear the Chancellor's grave speech. Some of them held each other, desperately afraid. Nothing would change the fact that _she_ had been the one to break the news to them, and she wondered if it would make them hate her any more than the fact of her wheelchair already did. She would never forget that she had put her name to the Earth mission, condemning one hundred sons and daughters to their possible deaths. But she was paying for it, and the price was Alfie.

She pushed her way inside their quarters half-blind by tears. Thankfully Kevin wasn't home, but only a small part of her thought to question where he was in the middle of all this turmoil. She found her way to the room that had once been Alfie's. Her husband had turned it into a study only days after their son had been taken away, but she could still smell him here, could still see him resting against the far wall, bending from his height to see out of the small porthole that served for a window. She tore her gaze away from the ghostly image and began to search.

The box she uncovered was hidden even from Kevin, in one of the loose panels near the air vent. Hooking stiff fingers around the lid, she prised it open and tipped the contents out on to her lap. Most of the collection was made up of Alfie's things – small trinkets she could easily hide away. But there were other things in there, things disallowed or just long forgotten, things that could help her. Things that could help Alfie, and Willard, and that girl Marlow – all the lost children on the ground that could find salvation within that box. Now she just had to find a way to get it to the ground.


	7. All The Children

**'All The Children'**

"Is he going to be okay?" Marlow asked with concern. Will was lying on a makeshift bed in a makeshift medical tent, wearing a makeshift bandage around his shoulder.

"It isn't going to kill him, if that's what you mean. Unless it gets infected of course, which is very likely in this environment," Flo answered. The Pyro had designated her as the unofficial medic for the camp, after he discovered she was the only one with any modicum of medical training. She was a pleasant girl, congenial and very sociable. Marlow only knew her from the bizarre circumstances surrounding her arrest, but after seeing her work on Will's wound with next to no necessary supplies, she had developed a healthy respect for the other girl.

"I'm just hoping he stays asleep, because boy, is that going to sting when he comes around," Flo continued, starting to gather her equipment.

Marlow looked over Will with sympathy. His eyelids fluttered every now and then, and the dark curls of his hair were stuck to his head with sweat. She had held him down while Flo pulled the arrow from his chest, and at that moment she was glad Alfie had had the foresight to take Sascha away. Will had screamed so loud she thought they might have been able to hear him back up there on the Ark.

"You don't have any painkillers?"

Flo shook her head, holding out her empty hands in demonstration. "We lost the medicine chest in the descent. I told Jareth about it but he said it's not exactly a 'priority'." Flo rolled her eyes. "I suppose it will stay that way until either he or his lackeys end up hurting themselves."

Flo was right. The Pyro was not likely to be roused to action by Will's injuries, of all people's. He would be similarly unmoved if she was the one hurt, or Alfie, or even little Sascha. That thought didn't sit right with her. She hoped they might have left the idea of a privileged upper class behind on the Ark. After being subject to such a system for all of their lives, why would they even entertain emulating it down here?

"I'll find it," Marlow announced suddenly. "The medicine chest, I mean."

Flo looked hopeful for a moment – an expression that was quickly replaced by a sceptical raised eyebrow. "You're going into the forest? With the friendly neighbourhood natives running around and firing welcome gifts at you?" She waved the broken, blood-stained arrow to illustrate her point.

"I'm not afraid of the Grounders ," Marlow said, raising her chin to make it look as though she believed the lie.

"Oh, Grounders? Is that what we're calling them?" Flo grinned as she continued to clean her workspace.

"It's a word I've heard thrown around. I like it better than some of the more… _colourful_ names I've heard, anyway."

The flap of the tent parted, and another girl entered, dark hair strewn every which way.

"Yeah, best keep your spicy language to yourself," Flo said devilishly. "My sister here has delicate ears."

The girl looked like a carbon copy of Flo, from the heart shape of her face to the very specific shade of her eyes. The only real difference was the embarrassed flush to her ochre cheeks. "Flo, you promised…" she muttered, putting a ration pack into her sister's hands.

If having a sibling was a strange occurrence on the Ark, having a _twin_ was stranger still. Marlow had never seen the two of them together before, and it was like looking side-on through a mirror. Aggie was a complete reflection of Flo, and Marlow could see just how easy it would have been to pull off the bait and switch manoeuvre they had been practising for so many years. But, watching them closely enough, the differences started to appear. Like the way Flo tore into her ration pack like a starving animal, while Aggie carefully dissected the wrappers and nibbled delicately at the food inside.

"This is Marlow," Flo said, through a mouth full of food. "You know, Driftwood, because her parents…"

"Flo!" Aggie exclaimed, obviously aghast. "You can't say things like that, it's…" She sighed, as though deciding it wasn't worth the effort. She continued on in an even tone, looking anywhere but at Marlow. "I've… well, I've heard about you before but I don't think we've ever, um…"

"Spoken?" Marlow finished as Aggie trailed off sorrowfully. "No, we haven't. But I answer to Driftwood too, so don't worry about it." She'd learned some years ago that it was hopeless to try and fight the nickname. It was stuck to her the same way as her shadow was stuck to her heels, and it was either embrace it or hide from it in the darkness forever. She couldn't do that – she loved the light too much. "So are you a medic too?"

Aggie looked down at her oil-stained clothes apologetically. "I'm… I'm a mechanic, actually."

"The best on the Ark! Well, before she was locked up anyway," Flo said enthusiastically, nudging her twin with a spiny elbow.

"Not quite that good," Aggie shrugged, but there was a hint of a proud smile on her face. "I was only an apprentice."

"A mechanic, huh?" Marlow was impressed. She loved to tinker with whatever objects she could get her hands on, but it was very rare that she actually knew what she was doing. She was very much a 'poke a stick in it and see' kind of worker. To have an actual, trained skill in something so useful… well, she half-wished she'd had the opportunity to learn while the option was there. "Oh," she realised suddenly, rolling up her sleeve to show her arm to Aggie. "Does that mean you know what these are?"

Aggie barely gave the wristband a fleeting glance. "They're tracking devices. My guess is that they're transmitting our vital signs back to the Ark. As long as they can see that we're living and breathing down here, they'll assume it's safe to follow us."

"Why wouldn't they have just set up a communications device?" Marlow frowned with confusion. "Wouldn't that have been simpler?"

"But they did," Aggie said, her eyes wide as she finally met Marlow's gaze. She suddenly seemed far more comfortable now that she was talking about machines and not real, live people. "There was a two-way radio built into the dropship, but it was fried during the landing. It's useless now."

Marlow thought for a moment. "Do you think you can fix it?"

The question seemed to catch Aggie off guard. "I mean, I could. If I had the right parts, but they'd be hard to find amongst the scrap…" She stopped short, and shook her head vigorously. "No, Jareth told me I had to make weapons a priority. I need to figure out how to make some kind of explosive or something…"

The thought of The Pyro with explosives was a bitter one. She doubted his need for such a thing was entirely rooted in a concern for the camp's protection. "Forget what Jareth said," Marlow told her. "That radio is a priority. And if he has a problem with that, you can send him my way."

Flo was wiping crumbs from her hands when she asked, "Why bother? The Ark doesn't want us, and we don't need them. Let them think we're dead. We can start our new lives here."

"I think the Ark is dying," Aggie said, and her quiet words were like an atom bomb.

A thick silence fell around them. Marlow was the first to broach it. "What do you mean?"

Aggie was studying her cracked fingernails intensely, looking for all the world like she wished she hadn't said anything. "I found… I found some numbers while I was working in engineering. They seemed to suggest that life support for the Ark was failing, and fast. I showed them to the chief engineer and he took them off my hands, but next time I asked him about them, he told me the equipment was faulty, that the readings it had given off were incorrect." She looked up, eyes watery. "I maintained that machine myself, each and every day for a year. I don't believe it could have been so inaccurate."

"Who was the chief engineer?" Marlow asked, alarm bells ringing in her head.

"Luther Conway."

"The council," Marlow grimaced. "They've been hiding this from all of us. That's why, after all these years. That's why we're here on Earth. We're their last hope." The weight of realisation settled on her shoulders. And yet she felt a sudden sense of pride rush through her, unbidden. She, nothing more than a scrap of Driftwood left behind by her criminal parents – she had a _purpose_ in all of this. The community that had tarnished her reputation with the same judging brush as they had used with her mother and father, that very same community needed _her_. This should have been her chance to get even. This should have been the time for her to strike back at the Ark, for all those wilting glances in the hallways, for all those vicious names whispered behind her back when she was no more than a child. These were the same people who had murdered her parents before she was old enough to even know them, who had robbed her of a life she had no way to fathom. They had told her, again and again, that she would never amount to anything, through nothing more than the quality of the blood that coursed red and hot through her veins. Every single person down there on the ground had a reason to turn their back on the Ark, and her most of all.

But something stopped her. The council could damn well float themselves for all she cared, but did the children really deserve such a cruel and terrible fate? A long, dark suffocation, all because she had abandoned them? There were kids like her still trapped up there in the sky, the very walls around them a ticking time bomb. And when oxygen got scarce, of course it would be the children without parents to mourn them that were tossed aside first. There was an orphanage of babies who had never known their fathers, never been sung to by their mothers, and who would never take a breath past their first birthday unless she, Marlow Cohen, stepped up to do something. Not for herself, and not for the council, but for them. The lost and the small, the damaged and the broken – her own people.

She couldn't form those thoughts into any coherent sentence, so she said instead, "Flo, there are children on board that space station. Families. I'm sure you have people you love up there too, right? We need to let them know that Earth is safe."

"But is it?" Aggie murmured, casting a look at the unconscious Will. His wound was slowly staining the cloth that served as a bandage. "What about whoever it was that put an arrow through Will?"

"Leave the Grounders to me," Marlow said, standing tall. "Aggie, please focus all your energy on getting that radio to work again. If you need anything at all – and I mean _anything_ – come and find me. Hopefully I'll be back with the medicine chest soon."

"Here." As she tried to leave, Aggie thrust a sealed ration pack between her fingers. "Thank you, Marlow. You're a good person."

Marlow tried to thank her, but the mechanic insisted on looking anywhere but at her. She slid the silvery packet into her back pocket, and stepped outside.

It was disgustingly humid. Everything about the world felt wet, and the sun was struggling to shine through the heavy clouds that shadowed the sky. Without its position as a guide, it was hard to know what time it was, but there were others setting up the fire pit as though it was dusk. She could tell they were destined to fail. It was too wet to light anything. She thought about going over to tell them, but she realised with a sudden lull how exhausted she was. She had been up all through the night, helping Flo with Will's wounds, but she felt too wired to sleep. Her brain was abuzz with thoughts and plans, and she knew in a heartbeat that she had to find Alfie.

She circuited the camp, hoping to find him, but she was quickly distracted by the uproar of a crowd somewhere nearby. She cocked her head to listen and she heard a few violent obscenities being thrown around beneath the tumult. Following the noise, she drew up alongside a group hidden in the corner of the camp. They looked like they were fighting, or maybe even celebrating. She was quickly learning that there was a fine line between the two circumstances. Deciding they were just being boys, she turned to walk away.

There was a sudden clutch at her wrist. "And where do you think you're going, blondie?"

One of the boys had her. She sighed with exasperation, turning to face him with a choice string of words ready to leap from her lips.

That was when she saw the knife. Her curses fell short, replaced instead by a desperate cry for help.


	8. Patient, Fine, Balanced, Kind

**A/N:** This chapter was co-written by my awesome partner in crime, Sealy!

* * *

 **'Patient, Fine, Balanced, Kind'**

Alfie had been in a vicious mood ever since he opened his eyes that morning. The dawn had barely broken, and he awoke in a hot, sweating heap on the saturated earth. When he found himself in charge of Sascha the previous night, he had given over his tent for her to rest in. She still slept inside, fraught and exhausted by Will's uncertain condition. The humidity that plagued the air made Alfie think that a storm was on its way, if his Earth Skills classes had taught him anything at all.

He had heard nothing of Will's recovery, and even less of the people who had shot him. Everyone had been referring to them as _Grounders_ , though who started that trend, he couldn't say. What he _did_ know was that there was fear, spreading like a virus through the camp. There had been no other sightings of these apparently hostile natives, but every one of the young criminals had their own theory about who they were and what they wanted, each of them more grandiose and absurd than the last. The Mount Weather expedition had been called off, but Alfie was still restless. They didn't have the luxury of time to wait for the Grounders to make a move. Rations were running low, not to mention the fact that there were nowhere near enough tents and blankets to go around.

The Pyro had wasted no time in delegating jobs to everyone, based on their skill, or lack thereof. A few of the more practical-minded were already in the process of erecting a perimeter wall, designed to keep the criminals in and the Grounders out. But Jareth hadn't given Alfie a task, nor did he particularly want one from their self-imposed leader. He could see what needed doing, and that was scouting. If there was anything edible or useful in the surrounding area, now was the time to find it. So, arming himself with the piece of scrap metal he was using for a weapon, he snuck past the builders and went out into the trees.

The search did nothing to improve his temper. He spent the best part of the humid day out in the woods looking for food and supplies, and all he had for his trouble was a handful of spoiled berries. He ate them on the way back to camp that evening, the taste of them as bitter as his mood. He was planning to check on Sascha, before he spotted the silhouette of someone familiar against the warm, grey dusk. It was Marlow. Almost immediately, he changed course to her direction – if anyone could get him out of this funk, she could. Blinking against the sharp grey light, he began to realise that she wasn't alone. The group that surrounded her seemed to be talking, but the light drowned out their features. He was about to call out in greeting, until he saw the flash of a blade.

Within a matter of moments, Marlow was on her knees. Some boys were holding her down, and she struggled. The knife was put to Marlow's wrist, and Alfie broke into a sprint.

"HEY!" he called out – hopefully a distraction if nothing else. Marlow's attackers were out of earshot, but the leader seemed to glance back at his call. Alfie recognised him immediately as Efren, a piece of shit from the cells who was usually more lackey than bully. He pushed on, faster now, but the ground felt like it was back-pedalling beneath his feet. The wet soil gave him no purchase, and he scrambled for a few heart-stopping seconds. The crowd had shifted. He couldn't see Marlow any more, couldn't see what was happening to her. It spurred him onwards. There were people in his way and as he reached them he pushed them aside indiscriminately. Bodies flew left and right as he marched his way through the mob, right up into the shocked face of the boy with the knife.

Alfie greeted him with a shove to the chest. The force sent Efren jogging backwards.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Alfie barked into his face. "You must think you're really tough, yeah? Waving a knife around at people like that?" He stopped long enough to cast Marlow a concerned glance. "You alright, Drift?" he asked, his voice losing none of its edge.

Marlow was persuading the hungry crowd to stay away, but her words were lost in the cheers and whoops. She gave Alfie a shaken look and said, "Yes, I'm fine. I don't even have a scratch."

His eyes searched her for the truth of that, hunting for a bruise, a scrape – anything that would make his blood course all the quicker.

"The kid's all bark, Al," Marlow continued, nervously tucking her hair behind her ear. "Let's just –" She stopped and watched in silence as a dark liquid trickled down her forearm. It looked black under the grey sky, but it was there, and it was blood. "Fucking hell," she murmured in horror.

The trail of blood held his hot red gaze until it touched her elbow, where it began to pool. All was silent but for the baying of the crowd that drew up like prison walls on all sides. Suddenly he was back in the cells, and the adrenaline was a fire in him. Efren was watching the blood too, his face drained of colour.

"You cut her," Alfie said in a monotone statement. His hands curled into fists, ready and eager.

Efren stared back at him. There was not an inch of remorse on his grinning face. The beads of sweat springing to his brow were the only things that betrayed his discomfort. He was obviously scared, but the expectant throng around him were not there to watch him cower. Alfie had seen it all before: the peer-induced rush of power right before a brawl. It made timid boys feel like heroes in the heat of the moment and seldom ended well for those who let it get to their heads.

"The blonde bitch tried to struggle," Efren said with a cocky shrug. "Shoulda just let us take her bracelet, then it might not've happened." He smiled that aggravating smile once more. "It's nothing she didn't deserve anyway."

Alfie leapt at him. The crowd surged at his back and cheers erupted on all sides, but he was deaf to them and blind to all the world besides the pathetic little speck in the dirt his opponent currently occupied. Alfie grabbed him by the collar, Efren's sweat making him as slippery as oil. Alfie held tight and Efren looked up with an expression that just dared him to try it.

And Alfie dared. Wrenching back his arm, he watched Efren's arrogant expression melt to one of horror as he threw a fist right into the bridge of his nose.

* * *

 _Visiting day._

It was a day of hope for many of the young criminals, but for others, it was something akin to torture. Alfie knew both sides of the story, and he had both loved and loathed visiting day for longer than what felt possible.

He had prepared himself the way he always did. Clothes freshly washed and pressed, shoes polished and laced up tight. He was the vision of obedience, just the way you might expect a Councillor's son to look. What failed him were the bruises and scratches littered across his face and arms. There was no hiding them, even if he had wanted to.

In a line of excited prisoners, Alfie stood aloof as the others chattered and joked around him. They knew who waited for _them_ , they always did – doting parents that still cared to take an hour out of their week to see the fading faces of their sons and daughters. He supposed he'd be happier too, if that was what awaited him.

The light above the door turned green, then opened. The guards ushered the waiting prisoners inside, and they jostled each other eagerly. This was a familiar dance. Push your way past the others, scan the faces, find your window, take a seat. Press that little white button and talk as though there was no smudged pane of glass between you and the real world.

Alfie scanned the faces of the visitors, his heart beating more than he would have allowed - hope was a slippery path and he couldn't let himself tumble down it. He reached the sixth window and knew his search was at an end.

Of course they weren't here. But _she_ was. And for all his disappointment, his spirit lifted.

Marlow sat behind the glass screen like nothing more than a movie being projected on to its surface. She scanned him over with eyes like film-cameras and, preluded by an almost inaudible click of the button, she spoke.

 _"You've been fighting again."_

Alfie grimaced immediately. He sat down heavily, hands shoved deep into his pockets. "Yeah."

Marlow drew back in offense. " _'Yeah?_ ' That's all you can say?"

The hurt was clear on her face, but for a moment, he couldn't understand what was so upsetting. He stared back at her hard as she pressed that white button again and cut off the line. Alfie watched Marlow's breath catch in her throat. She looked at him with wet, quivering eyes before letting her face fall into her hands. The sound of her tears was drowned in silence from that broken connection. He wanted nothing more than to reach out to her, comfort her with a pat on her shoulder, a touch on the hand. But something more than that glass pane stood in the way – there was also his pride, a great impenetrable wall that he could never hope to scale. Though his heart raced with urgency, he was forced to sit and watch her, as expressionless as he was powerless.

Her hand slammed the button. "Can't you see you're _killing yourself?"_ she asked, her voice brimming with emotion. "Why'd you even show up today? Why do you keep coming to this damn desk if you're just going to throw it all away? They're going to float you Al, and it's like you don't even care."

He let out a frustrated sigh and turned his gaze aside. "I'm not talking about this again."

"Yes, we _are_ talking about this again, and we'll keep talking about it until you finally let some sense into that thick skull of yours," she hissed. "Every punch you throw is bringing you one step closer to that airlock, but it's not this dark and beat up boy that's going to die. It'll be my best friend. No one will remember _him_ now that he's been replaced by...whoever you are."

Alfie almost laughed in disbelief – it took a lot to get a rise out of the otherwise calm and collected Marlow.

"This is me, Drift." He shrugged. "Scars, bad attitude and all. I've made my peace with that and so have my parents. You should, too."

He watched her face become sickly pale.

"Fine…" she gulped. "If I'm not worth it, then Julia has to be, right?" The name rang in his ears and suddenly nothing was funny anymore, but Marlow did not relent. "She'll be here waiting for you one day. I know she will. But if you don't keep your head down and get yourself pardoned…"

"No," he cut her off and let out a long, shuddering breath. "No, she's not coming. She never will. She won't go against my Dad's wishes, and he's made his feelings about me quite clear. And you know what? He's right."

"Oh, so I should be listening to Kevin now? The Alfie I knew would never let that man dictate a single aspect of his fate."

"I'm just saying, holding onto the hope that I'm ever going to change or somehow atone for my crimes is just a waste of your life and your effort. It's me that's not worth it, not you. Never you."

Marlow slouched back in her chair, breaking her usual perfect posture. She sat there in silence for a few moments, and Alfie wondered if she was finally going to turn and run.

"Listen…" she stayed on the connection. Her voice much softer now. "Your parents lost their way. They'll find it again."

"Why do you have to keep talking about them as if it'll make a damn difference?"

"- Because, you only respond to _pain!_ " Her voice pounded through the receiver, the connection slightly distorted. "You don't get the luxury of feeling numb anymore. Not when the rest of us are left here suffering. Julia included."

" _Goddamnit_ ," Alfie growled. He leaned forward in his chair, as if it would somehow reduce the distance of lost years between them. He concentrated on threading his grazed fingers into one another, before meeting Marlow's eyes to say, "You don't get it, do you? She's given up on me. And frankly, I'm starting to think she's made the right decision."

"You don't expect me to believe that, do you?" She asked. "I thought you were too stubborn to die. I mean, it just boggles my mind. Nearly two years you've been in here and I've never been able to walk away from this, not even for a moment. Tell me, what makes it so easy for you?"

"You think this is easy?" he demanded, holding her gaze as best as he could through that intrusive pane of glass. "There's nothing fucking easy about this, Drift. The very day I was thrown in here, I lost my chance of being pardoned. To be 'stubborn' would be to blindly hang on to the hope that I could one day grovel at the council's feet and beg for their forgiveness, after all this time, after what I did. They don't want that, and neither do I."

Alfie dug his fists into his knees, desperate to hit something, but his furious tone had already attracted the attention of the guards. They hovered nearby, waiting for an excuse to drag him away. He lowered his voice and spoke through gritted teeth. "I'm on borrowed time, and I'm going to damn well make it count. The guy I fought with yesterday? He was groping one of the girls while we were on laundry duty. She was a _kid_. He thought it was fucking hilarious that the guards were ignoring it – on purpose, unintentionally, it didn't matter. He was doing it right under their fucking noses, and they didn't even bat an eyelid. If I wasn't there to stop him, who would have? How far would he have gone? She couldn't have stood up for herself, not against a jackass like that. So I set him straight myself."

It seemed he had finally said something that resonated, for naive, little Marlow looked back at him completely disturbed.

" - but then what happened? Did you just…not stop? Strike him over and over again until it wasn't even about the girl anymore? Did he have to give you those bruises in the sheer panic that you were going to kill him? Because that's what they look like to me."

Alfie tried to offer some sort of objection, but she was right, and he was defenceless. She stared at him with those film-camera eyes, and recorded his every word misspoken, his every good deed gone wrong. She knew him too well. When she rested back in her chair, he thought she was done, but then she added, "Your mom would be so proud."

He gripped the sharp edge of his chair, curling his fingers around it until the skin started to break. He needed another outlet for the tears he felt threatening, and there was one state of mind that was too easy for him to slip into. Like the familiar, well-worn path in his solitary cell where he paced for days, his mind knew the steps, could walk it with his eyes closed. All he had to do was will it, and the anger began rising in him, the adrenaline firing like pistons from every recess of his mind. His vision narrowed, and the tears quickly dismissed. He slammed his fist down on the desk in front of him. It was no threat, just the first crack of lightning in the storm that had engulfed him.

"That's right, get mad at me," she goaded him, not even flinching at his outburst. "Yell, scream, tell me you hate me for all I care. Heck, if I could walk through this glass and have you beat me up I'd let you. Would you do it, Alfie? Because right now, I swear, you're pushing away the only person that's ever come to see you in the last two years. If that's what you want, I promise you'll never have to see me again, just tell me you'll stop this ridiculous crusade."

A guard drew up beside him, and Alfie heard the familiar clank of the metal cuffs. It was enough of a warning. He took a steadying breath and lowered his voice before he spoke again. "You know I can't. This is why I'm here. This is my purpose. There are people that need protecting and while I'm still breathing this manufactured air rather than the space dust that's waiting for me out there, I'm going to do just that. So don't you _dare_ expect me to just look the other way and keep my mouth shut, all for some selfish, futile hope that I might save my own skin. I couldn't live with that weight on my shoulders, and I'm pretty sure you couldn't either."

"That's why you're here? What, you think this was your destiny?" Marlow pressed her fingers to her temples, her head shaking at him. "You could have changed things, Alfie. And I mean _really_ changed things. You could've followed your parents, became a council member. Hell, maybe even Chancellor."

He scoffed. "And you think I'd be happy doing that? Making some unimportant decisions from atop a gilded pedestal?"

"You've got the genes to do it, why not? You could have done things right for our people. But instead, I'll be here, the only person who's heard your noble pledge and has a heart beating quick enough to fulfill it."

"Go on then," he said, trying his best to give her a mocking glance through the pane of glass. All he could see was his own cruel reflection. "Give it your best shot, save the Ark, change the world. I don't know what's stopping you when you obviously know so much."

"Oh believe me, I would," said Marlow,"but god knows they won't elect a girl with blood so filthy."

Marlow reached into her jacket and pulled out the deck of cards she always kept on her. Alfie watched her lazily shuffling through them until she held a particular one between her fingers. She stood from her chair and, in one sharp motion, wet the face of the card with her tongue.

"Have fun playing hero," Marlow said. She stuck the moist card to the glass and walked away.

The old, wrinkled card bore a bearded man digging a knife into his head; The King of Hearts. _The Suicide King._

The empty expression on her face seemed to have stained the glass - that hurt, judging look, with eyes that were nothing but infinite voids of betrayal. He hated that look. He hated even more that he had caused it. She had gone, but his anger had not. She had abandoned him with it and no way to deal with its consequences. Only the card remained, the doomed king's sombre expression judging him like the fiercest of juries. He stood, and with a powerful lurch, kicked his chair clean against the wall. It clattered as it fell. The room dropped to a quick hush, prisoners and visitors all looking his way. The guards were behind him, hooking him under his arms again, just like yesterday. They weren't going to give him the chance to lash out like he wanted to. They threatened to take his visiting privileges away for good, and he just wanted to scream in their faces, _'What does it matter? She's gone anyway. Who would come to see me now?'_

He kicked and cursed and spat all the way back to the solitary cell, where, as the doors slammed shut behind him and left him in the dark, he finally found some peace.

* * *

The crowd cheered deafeningly as Efren's nose exploded in a stream of blood. Alfie let go of his collar, surrendering him to gravity. His body seemed to bounce as it hit the ground. The thud of his spine against the earth was audible even above the loud jeering of the onlookers.

Just as Alfie expected, Efren was over-confident. Instead of lying down and accepting his punishment, he got back up. The blood trickled down his chin as he gestured to the crowd, indicating he was still fine enough to fight. Alfie was glad. One punch wasn't enough for this swaggering fool. Efren sprang at him, and the two locked limbs in a struggle.

On the precipice of his consciousness was the ghost of a ghost, a spectre of his memory made real. She watched him now with no glass between them, nothing to obscure him from those film-camera eyes.


	9. Sword & Shield

A/N: Apologies for the short delay between chapters - we've been using this time to revamp the story's blog and add some cool new extras. Hope we'll see you there!

* * *

 **'Sword & Shield'**

Marlow's hands clasped instinctively to her mouth. The sound of Alfie's fist connecting with the bone and cartilage of Efren's face was something she had only heard in old movies. She always thought they had exaggerated the sound for the film's sake, but if anything, it sounded grossly worse in reality.

The crowd roared at deafening decibels the moment Efren hit the ground. _Just get up and walk away,_ she willed him. _End this now._

Efren rose with the same shit-eating grin from before spread proudly across his face. The way he enjoyed this made Marlow feel sick.

The boys charged each other again. They locked together, each trying to get the advantage to strike again. Marlow stood back, ill-equipped to break up fights. Every second that passed had her feeling more and more helpless. Her feet paced uncomfortably around them. The stronger the boys pushed and pulled at each other, the more Marlow began to see them melt into one singular unit. Alfie and Efren had become an overheated kicking and spitting machine right before the crowd's eyes, and they were being encased by walls of cheers and screams.

Alfie kicked Efren's left foot from under him and reaped the advantage. He jerked his fist back for another blow when Marlow leapt into the inner circle. After years of tinkering and putting things together, Marlow knew a thing or two about taking things _apart_ as well. She grabbed Alfie by the middle and yanked him aside, and like a bolt being unscrewed, or a wire unplugged, the boys fell apart.

Efren fell forward, catching himself just before he hit the ground. Alfie continued to thrash, ready to add whoever had interrupted them into the fight in his blind rage. Marlow ducked under a punch and clamped her hands on his shoulders.

"Alfie, please — it's okay. Just calm down."

"Oh, Blondie wants to fight too, huh?"

Marlow's words caught in her throat. The sound of that idiot's voice was unbearable to her ears. _He_ had caused this. She whipped her body around, a knife flicking into her grasp like a card in one of her magic tricks. "Oh my god, will you just _shut up_?" His eyes grew wide as she held the sharp tip just under his was the thing about the rest of the One Hundred — they couldn't read Marlow enough to know she always had something up her sleeve.

Efren looked down at the knife, breathing a little harder. He licked his lips nervously and looked as though he wanted to say something, but she wasn't about to give him that opportunity.

"You're nothing. Why do you insist on opening your ugly mug when I might've just saved it from being beaten in? And trying to take my wristband? Dick move, man. Dick move."

The crowd were going ballistic now, all of them like children throwing a fit from having their toys taken away. She wanted to scold them all. They had wanted a fight, but she wasn't going to allow them that sick, sad pleasure.

Alfie was at her side, watching the scene with glassy-eyes as the adrenaline left him.

"Would you mind grabbing his knife for me?" she asked him. "It's in the left cuff of his boot." She made sure to give Efren a sweet, twisted smile as he rolled his eyes and huffed. Alfie circled him almost robotically, and tugged the knife away. Marlow pretended not to notice as he clipped Efren's leg with the blade. He swore loudly.

"Hey, watch your mouth around me," she scolded. "I'm a lady, asshole."

Alfie stalked back to her side, watching her the whole way. Truthfully, she didn't know why he was staring. If anything, she thought he should be focused on Efren, but she wasn't able to step outside herself to see how absurd the view was – her cold eyes unshaken, a knife she'd normally use only for carving gripped tightly in her hand, and the fact that Alfie had actually listened to her for once in his life. His shoulder brushed against Marlow's when he rejoined her, and she took the time to offer him a small glance of gratitude. Alfie was a steel-plated shield strapped to her arm – even if she didn't need it, it was nice knowing it was there.

"Why?" Alfie commanded the bully, the confiscated knife pointing in the region of Efren's stomach. "Why did you want to take her wristband?"

The boy didn't seem to know which one of them to look at. His eyes darted between them and their knives in a display of nervous tension.

"We've all been taking them off." He gestured to the group behind him, all of them wristband-less. "The Ark doesn't own us anymore. What are we to them? We're doing all their dirty work just to be their prisoners again the minute they follow us down here."

Marlow bristled. "Well it's my own damn right if I want to keep-"

"I'm just telling him why," Efren cut her off, holding his hands up innocently. Blood was still trickling slowly from his nostrils. "He asked why, so I'm telling him. Now can I have my knife back? It's the only one I have."

" _Had_ ," Marlow corrected. She looked towards Alfie, hoping for some kind of lead, but found him staring at his own wrist in a state of deep contemplation.

"Show me how to take this thing off and you can have the knife back," Alfie said, taking a sudden step forward in what seemed like a deliberate attempt to hide his face. But Marlow didn't need to see his eyes to know what thoughts were swirling within them. The Ark had crossed him one too many times. Up there he was no one, he was expendable. It was the same for her, but she couldn't keep the orphanage out of her head. If the wristbands were how the Ark was determining the condition of life on Earth, keeping them on and surviving down here was the only way to save all those innocent children.

The question wasn't simple, but it was hard to shake from her locking bones. Would the council's jurisdiction change on Earth? She had to believe so. She had spent too many hours on the Ark dreaming of this planet. The daily fight for survival wouldn't end down here, nor would it ever with human mortality dripping away their time like a leaky faucet. But the fight for air would change, and Marlow knew her bracelet had to stay. She hadn't told Alfie about the Ark's crisis, but the wristband was to him more shackle than tracking device. She knew his argument by heart. Of course he wanted it gone.

Efren was grinning again. "Well, I can take it off for you, but I'll need my knife to do it," he said, casually now, and reached out for the blade.

Marlow snatched the weapon before he could grasp it. Both boys looked at her in surprise. "Yeah, no, I don't trust you." She slid the weapon into her makeshift satchel, then turned to Alfie to say, in a hushed tone, "He tried to take mine off… and from what I can tell, it doesn't take much. I'll do it for you."

The crowd were gathering, trying to get closer to hear her quiet words. Efren was huffing and rolling his eyes again. Marlow wondered how long it had taken him to make that shit knife anyway. "It's a piece of scrap metal, not a family heirloom. You'll get over it."

She tugged Alfie's arm, pulling him a few steps away. "I swear, I'm not playing you. I'll take it off if that's… if that's what you really want."

"You'd do that? For me?" he asked, in a voice just as quiet and sincere as hers.

"Of course." Her eyes broke away to quickly scan the crowd. The flock of teens were growing restless, whispering amongst each other and gesturing to Alfie. They were eager to see someone so infamous take off his wristband. "But, please, somewhere… alone?"

His eyes followed hers around the crowd. They were still looking for a show, but this wasn't one Marlow and Alfie were willing to give them. "Come on, let's go," he said.

She took the lead, the jeering of the crowd following them all the way out of the clearing and into the thicker wall of trees that she only hoped would shield them.

"Okay," she said, trying her best not to sound anxious. "Based on what that asshole tried to do to me, it seems like they just pull off. Then, I'm guessing it opens once the bracelet is detached from your vitals. But Alfie, if I do this… Julia's going to think you're-"

"Dead?" he said sharply. "I've been dead to her for four years, no matter how quickly my heart's been beating."

Marlow didn't say anything. She knew there was nothing she could say to make any of it better.

She sat down cross-legged beside a tree-stump and gestured for him to sit at the other side. She took a different knife from her bag, the same dull tool she'd brought with her from the cells. It was perfectly safe for chopping soft things – or, in this case, cutting Alfie's ties to his past life forever. "Not that pain bothers you, like, at all. In fact, sometimes I think you even _enjoy_ it, but this is going to hurt. It'll feel like a large seed is being pulled through your pores, which is probably the epidermal equivalent to birthing a child out of your… It's just not going to feel good, okay?" She took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking.

"Hey," Alfie said softly, his eyes trained on the quivering knife. "I trust you, you know."

The words robbed her of her worry. Coming from Alfie, that was high praise. Sure, he might have been her friend – her _only_ friend – but that didn't mean he had to trust her with a knife to his wrist."I… well, thanks."

He didn't seem to hear her soft gratitude, concerned as he was with laying his arm across the tree stump between them. "Now hurry up, Drift. My insatiable thirst for pain makes your description sound _irresistible_."

Despite herself, she chuckled. He was so goddamn eager, and he wouldn't have even known about this if it wasn't for her. Yet, here he was, trying to rush her. "Watch it," she grinned, tossing the knife between her hands to stall him even more. He wanted to be impatient? Let him.

Alfie shot her a wide smirk. He shifted his weight from one bent knee to another. She finally put the knife to his skin, and he wet his lips in anticipation. His arm was tense, his fists clenched so she could see the cords of his veins all along it. She snaked the knife under the bracelet and took a deep breath.

"You know," she said, pulling away suddenly. Alfie let out a low growl of frustration. "I'm pretty sure a poet somewhere, some time, said pain is art. And art takes time. I feel like that resonates with you because…" Without warning, she flicked her hand down, and like a see-saw, the knife pulled the thick needles of the bracelet out through Alfie's now broken skin. He hissed like a viper, and grabbed at his wrist. " - because you're an artist of pain, right? I'm pretty sure that weasel's gonna be whining about his broken nose for a week."

She grinned and tossed Alfie the deadened wristband. Its blinking lights were now nothing but blind eyes. Alfie let it fall into his lap, before picking it up with his one good arm. He marvelled at it, his eyes full of wild elation. "You did it." He shot her a grin. "You actually fucking did it, Drift. I'm – it's just… well thanks."

Outside of a fight, it was rare for her to see him looking so alive. She hid her proud smile as she searched through her bag. With no medicine chest, there was no hope of a proper bandage, but she found a scrap of material that would do the trick.

"You know," Marlow said, carefully wrapping his wrist. "If I was on the Ark right now, unaware of the Earth mission, I would be thinking you were dead." She paused for a small moment and glanced up at him. "Happy belated-birthday, by the way."

"I suppose I should be mad at you for forgetting, but this is a better gift than anything the council had planned for me." He tried to grin at her even as his wrist throbbed. "I'll take epidermal abrasions over a lungful of space junk any day."

"Well, it's not like we've had a whole lot of time to bake cakes and blow up balloons, Alfie. Your next gift is going to be a knife to the chest if you keep lunging at people like that." A small smile flit across her features before she tore the gauze with her teeth and secured the bandage. "But, I'm glad you showed up when you did."

"Look at that, the Suicide King came through for you," he smiled, teeth gritted.

She looked up at him suddenly, a sharp memory bled through her mind.

"Yeah, I hadn't forgotten," Alfie continued, obviously relishing the surprise on her face. "Seems like you've shed some of your disapproval since back then, based on how you held that knife. Efren damn near pissed himself."

"That feels like ages ago..." Marlow stood up and brushed her clothes off, though she wasn't sure why. If anything, the mud and debris helped cover the blood stains left by the deer, but Marlow was still getting used to being dirty. To being imperfect.

"I get it now," she said softly, bringing herself back to the dark day she had almost disowned him. "I get that you had to protect people like Sascha from people like Jareth, and I'm afraid that's not subject to change down here. You've got your freedom now. You're not the Ark's decision anymore, but your own. Don't waste it by doing something out of control...or I'll have to stick the card to your forehead next time."

"Here," he said, reaching into one of his pockets. What he handed her was a card. It wasn't one of hers, she could tell that in an instant, but it bore the same design: the king with a dagger through his head. "Consider it a promise. No wasted opportunities. No hot-headed decisions. Whatever trouble I get into on Earth, I'll always have a reason. If you think I'm doing otherwise, carry on and stick the damn card to my forehead, if that's what helps you sleep at night."

Marlow eyed each side of the card as she flipped it around between her fingers. Her deck had felt incomplete since that day in the visitation room, but at least now it could have a replacement. "I'm not even going to ask how you got this." Knowing him, he likely peeled it out the hands of some reluctant criminal, started a lunch riot in the process. "I can't recall the last time you made a promise to anyone, and this isn't exactly chocolates past curfew… but okay."

Alfie flashed her a grin before wrenching back his good arm and throwing the broken wristband out into the forest. They didn't even hear it land.

Marlow let Alfie lead the way back to camp. She held her stinging wrist with the other hand the entire way, praying her wristband would continue to work. As the sky grew darker, the silhouette of the Ark watched them like a ghost, and Marlow couldn't fight the sinking feeling as she pictured a thousand hearts of a thousand Julias shattered in an instant. The supposed death of Alfie Seabrooke was not just the death of a son, or a criminal, but it was one step closer to the death of a nation.


	10. Sacrifices

**10 - 'Sacrifices'**

Luther had spent only three days in the cells for his insubordination, and Julia couldn't help but think that it wasn't nearly long enough. In fact, the imprisonment barely seemed to faze him. He sat now at the Chancellor's right hand, addressing the rest of the Council in a cool and collected voice.

"And so I put it to you, to us, that we have a very difficult decision to make. We need time that we simply don't have. Oxygen is running low. Sacrifices need to be made."

Julia gave him a hard look from the Chancellor's left. "You make it sound so simple, Luther. But the sacrifice you're suggesting is the murder of three hundred and twenty citizens. This is no trivial thing."

"Julia, I am not blind to the reality of this. I know what this would mean for our people."

" _Your_ people?" Julia scoffed. "The same people you were so hell-bent on lying to mere days ago? Tell me, Luther – what lies will you tell _your_ people when you're herding them into Section 17 to die?"

The Chancellor cleared his throat, and Julia felt a touch on her hand. Kevin was studying her closely. She returned his touch and tried to dial back her anger. The pause was long enough to allow Luther his rebuke.

"Councillor Seabrooke," he said, condescendingly. "Surely you don't think I would let these people die without recompense? We will be asking volunteers to enter Section 17 for the cull. If they find themselves able to make the sacrifice, their families will be awarded a healthy addition to their credit accounts. Their children and families will want for nothing."

"An empty promise if we _do_ make it to the ground," Julia remarked. "What good would credits be on Earth? Surely the best reward would be having their loved ones there with them to celebrate the return to our planet?"

"We can debate the finer points of this all day," the Chancellor finally said. "This, I agree, is a moral grey area. But as far as I can see, our choices at this late stage are limited. Making a sacrifice of three hundred now will allow another month of oxygen for the rest of us here on the Ark. That could be all the time we need to find our way down to the ground."

"I notice you're including yourself in the survivors," Julia said, narrowing her eyes at him. "There hasn't even been a discussion as to whether we should be five of the three-hundred and twenty."

Nathaniel could have only looked more indignant if she had slapped him. "I'm the Chancellor. Without me, these people have no leader, no guidance, I-"

Beside her, Kevin leaned forward in his chair. "With all due respect, Nathaniel, there are people who could step into your role. After we'd sung praises of your heroic gesture, of course. It would be a brave act no one is likely to forget in this time of crisis."

The Chancellor's face grew stormy. "One more word like that, Kevin, and _you'll_ be the next one tried for insubordination."

"Kevin does raise an interesting point," Luther smiled venomously, and Julia knew she wouldn't like what he had to say next. "Perhaps it would increase the morale of the population if the Council made its own sacrifice for the cause. Maybe if one of our own offered to enter Section 17 of their own accord? Say, for instance, a council member with a life-limiting illness?"

Under his stare, only one thought crossed her mind. _Alfie. Would he ever know what became of me?_

Kevin rose up in his chair, face red with rage. "Luther, if you keep talking to my wife like that, I'll throw you out of the airlock myself."

"Council, please!" Nathaniel demanded, his hands striking the table. He let the silence settle before resting back in his chair. "It's obvious that we have a lot to consider, and quickly. We will deliberate for a day and no longer. By then, I will have reached a concrete decision and we will have chosen an _inspiring_ way to let the people know we are with them. We reconvene tomorrow."

No one spoke as they filed out into the hallway. Kevin offered to push her wheelchair but she waved him away as kindly as she could. One display of weakness in front of Luther and she was done. He was a predator, just waiting to sink his teeth into her if it only meant he could secure his place as the next Chancellor.

Mercifully, Luther stalked away without so much as a word. Kevin left her too, citing his need to return to the science station. She was alone only for a moment before someone came jogging towards her.

"Councillor Seabrooke?" The boy who spoke looked only a couple years older than her son. He bore a long, white lab coat with patches of gray and held an electronic tablet in his right hand. The attire was typical for a medical apprentice. "Dr Arnold is requesting your presence in mission control immediately."

"Do you know under what circumstances?"

"He did not tell me, Councillor."

She nodded her consent and began to follow. The boy looked nervously around the empty hallway, and shortened his strides awkwardly to allow Julia to keep up with him. He cleared his throat and glued his eyes to his tablet just before leading her through a lounge inhabited by residents who were chatting and dining.

Julia couldn't help but feel the stares of each and every person they passed. All of them dropped their conversations and slowed their chewing to watch them walk through. She had been the harbinger of their fate, and they scoured her face as though hoping to read the solution between the worry lines in her forehead. The boy seemed determined not to notice the attention, but still itched nervously at his curly hair.

The boy dropped behind her as they came towards the exit. She felt a small push on the back of her chair that helped them escape the stares even faster, and they were once again engulfed in the solitude of another vacant hallway.

"Your name is Loren, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am. Loren Matthews of Siegfried and Jenna." His voice was casual, but he still did not look up from his tablet. He clicked and swiped ably with his left hand as a deep furrow formed in his brow.

"May I ask what you are doing on your display, Loren?"

The boy finally snapped from his trance to look down at her. "Oh, pardon my distrait, Councillor. These days it seems I choose to be constantly on the job."

Loren held his tablet out for Julia to see as he scrolled through a dozen young criminals and their projected vitals. "I'm in charge of monitoring females fifteen and under on the Earth mission; the smallest of the demographics because of my apprentice status."

Loren enlarged the tab of a young, dark girl with curly hair. "I'm keeping a close watch on this one. Sascha. She's been showing spikes of stress for the past few days. Connecting their data to a definite cause is like trying to solve a puzzle with a missing piece. With the communication system down, we have no way of knowing if these are symptoms of thriving, or of harm." Loren minimized Sascha's display and held a door open for Julia to wheel through.

"I'm sure there's nothing to be concerned about," Julia began her rehearsed spiel. "There's been nothing to suggest…"

"That's bullshit," she heard Loren mutter under his breath.

"Excuse me?"

"Oh, err - no offense, Councillor Seabrooke, but what you say is bullshit. There have been numerous… numerous casualties." Loren gestured to the two tabs darkened on his display, two young girls without heart rates, their images filtered to black and white like the ghosts they now were. The boy's face fell in shame.

"I know I shouldn't feel at fault. There is nothing I can do. If I see their stress spike, I suppose I could engage the emergency adrenaline shot in their trackers, but… I don't like playing God, Councillor."

Loren quickly squeezed the six-pointed star that hung from a gold chain around his neck. It seemed to be the only reason he was able to keep a steady voice throughout his heavy words.

"You're right, Loren. You're not at fault, and I don't know what's causing these readings. That's the honest answer. Without those radios we're as good as blind to what's awaiting them down there. But, it could also be a flaw in the tracking system, please remember that."

Loren sighed, gluing his eyes back to his tablet and beginning a new sequence of swipes and clicks. "Though I am a promoter of faith, I'm not sure it's the tracking system that's flawed."

They passed a large window as they neared the medical bay. This side of the station offered the best vantage of Earth as it shone like a beacon just below them. From the way it spun, slowly, without consequence, she would never have believed the horrors that it housed.

"We may need to hurry. Dr Arnold seemed pretty anxious to see you, and I'm eager to record Sascha's readings. Her hydration levels suggest she might've found water. Same with Alexa, Carey, and Judith. Would you like me to-?"

She kept her hands turning firmly at her wheels. "No, Loren. I'm fine. Thank you."

The headquarters for the Earth mission was milling with people from many different sectors. Engineers, medics and analysts alike busied around huge screens that dominated the main wall, each one displaying the names, photographs and life signs of the hundred young prisoners down on the ground. Some were greyed out, just like the two girls on Loren's display. They had a heavy white 'x' through their image that might as well run right through the heart of each parent who had suffered the terrible loss.

Julia scanned the screens for familiar faces. She found Willard Dawson, the Chancellor's son; Flo, who had once worked in sick bay, and her twin sister Aggie from engineering; even Marlow was there, whose pretty face made her sick with guilt. Her eyes whirled around again, not finding Alfie.

Someone grabbed her by the shoulders. "Julia, listen to me..."

It was Dr Arnold. She didn't need to listen to him. She heard his voice, heard his tone. Somewhere behind her she heard Loren stifle a sharp gasp.

"No," she said.

Then she found him. Alfie's face, her _son's_ face, greyed out, pallid and cold like a corpse. His vital signs were stagnant, dead. Just like him.

"No," she said again. Her shoulders began to shake, and the hands that held her shook with them. Then she was crying, and someone was pressing her oxygen mask between her fingers. She sucked in the air hungrily, unsure if the pain in her chest was her illness or the feeling of her heart breaking. Loren was fumbling with a control pad to disable Alfie's screen so she could no longer look into the darkened eyes of her lost son. Her only son.

Dr Arnold was talking to her, but not a word he said registered. Alfie was gone. He was dead, and it was all because of her. The last thing he'd ever remember of her was the fact that she had disowned him. Would he ever have believed that none of it had been her idea? None of it. Not even for a moment had she wanted to forget her fierce and brilliant son, no matter what cruel fate befell him.

"How long…?" she gasped in short breaths.

"His tracker cut out a few hours ago. We… we wanted to be sure before we called you in here," Dr Arnold explained.

"How…?"

"We don't know. But it was sudden. There was some activity in his last hour – an accelerated heart rate, some neurological responses to pain, but nothing enough to, well…"

The doors of the medical bay slid apart, and someone entered. Suddenly Julia was aware that Kevin was behind her. Someone must have called him too. She was surprised he even came, but of course he would have had to see for himself.

Hastily, she dried her face and disguised her heaving breaths with more gasps into her oxygen mask.

"When?" Kevin barked, emotionlessly.

"A few hours ago," Dr Arnold replied. A tense silence settled into the room, as though no one knew whether to comfort Kevin on his loss or to congratulate him for finally being free of his life-long burden. Loren hung his head over the control pad, left hand on his necklace, and eyes closed tightly to the rest of the room.

"Come on, Julia. Let's go home," he said, finally, and he began to wheel her chair away, out of the door.

"Wait!" she cried, pulling on her brakes. Sharply, she stopped right in front of Loren. The tears were shining sympathetically in soft green eyes. She held her hand out to him, and he took it without a moment's thought.

"I am so sorry," the boy said.

For once he was actually looking her in the eyes. "Can you give us a moment?" Julia asked Kevin who was hovering beside her like a shadow.

Her husband nodded brusquely and went to wait outside. Others in the medical bay seemed to remember themselves and carried on with their work. Julia took her chance and pressed something into Loren's palm.

"There's only one way to find out what's happening to your subjects, to my son, and that's to see for yourself."

"What? How could I possibly…?"

"You care about them. I know you do. You'll find a way."

She wheeled herself away, before she lost her nerve. She went to the door, to the light bright world where Alfie no longer existed and she, really and truly, no longer had a son. Kevin waited, indifferent, a column of stone in the midst of this emotional storm.

She could feel every pair of eyes in mission control on her back as she told him, loud enough for everyone to hear: "Tell the Chancellor that I'm volunteering for Section 17. I'm ready to make my sacrifice."


	11. No Harm Done

**11 – 'No Harm Done'**

Will tried to open his eyes, but he couldn't.

No, his eyes were open, but only to a perpetual, eternal blackness. It went on for… hours, miles, weeks? Just how did you measure darkness?

Then there was a voice.

"He don't look so bad to me."

"He's been through a lot, Jareth. Don't be a dick."

The Pyro's tone turned sour. "You better check who you're talking to, medic. Unless you want me to toss you out as Grounder bait."

The room came into focus at last, his eyelids heavy under the weight of so much sleep and pain. The first thing he saw was Flo, visibly biting her tongue so as not to snap back at their leader. Will could understand the frustration. He tried to smile at Flo, a show of support for her precarious position, but he was stopped by a sharp stab of agony. It began deep in his chest, and splintered horribly down his arm. It confused him until he remembered the sight of the arrow sticking out through his shoulder blade. He started to panic, to sweat. He tried to move his arm, but nothing happened. Just pain, searing and hot.

"Whoa, whoa! Don't move!" Flo's hands were on his chest, somewhere below the point of agony. "Will, I need you to stop moving now, okay? Just be calm, take some deep breaths."

He breathed, long and deep. The air felt like knives. He tried to make a sound, but instead choked and spluttered on it.

Somewhere far away, The Pyro was laughing. "How the mighty have fallen – eh, Chancellor?"

Will's annoyance gave him something else to focus on. The pain subsided and he became aware of Flo's hand again. This time she was stroking his forehead.

"As fun as it is to watch him squirm," The Pyro continued, uninvited, "is there a point to you draggin' me here? This camp don't run itself, you know."

"If only it did," Flo murmured, just loud enough for Will to hear, before she turned to face The Pyro head on. "My sister says you've been giving her a hard time about this business with the weapons. I just wanted you to see that we've got more pressing concerns right now."

"Like this pathetic sack of shit? I'm sorry if the Chancellor's boo-boos aren't exactly my number one concern. I ain't his mommy."

"You know what I mean, Jareth. It's not just Will. We need painkillers, we need food. We need clothing and clean water. Half the camp doesn't even have tents. We need Mount Weather."

Jareth's hands shot up in a gesture of innocence. It was as false as his affront. "Hey, it ain't my fault the valiant crusaders failed in their righteous mission to save us all." Will felt a stab of guilt more painful than the hole in his chest. "There's a mob of Grounders right outside our wall looking for any opportunity to murder us while we sleep. My hands are tied."

"And weapons will solve that?" Flo retorted.

"They'll help us blast our way to Mount Weather. If your sister does her job right, that is."

"That's right, Jareth. Pin the massive loss of life on to Aggie. Marlow thinks we'd be better off using our resources to try and contact the Ark."

The Pyro made a short, sharp sound that was half-way between frustration and amusement. "Does she now? Well I've got two words for Marlow _and_ the Ark-"

There was a clamour outside, and Jareth was cut short by someone bursting into the tent. "Something weird's going on! You gotta get out here!"

The Pyro left without so much as a glance in their direction. Will was relieved, but Flo looked concerned. "Here," she said, pressing a container of something warm and sweet-smelling into his hands. "I'll be right back."

"Wait, what's going on?" Will asked, his voice hoarse.

"I'll let you know after I've checked it out."

"Wait! Sascha…"

"She'll be fine. Stay put."

And she left. In the sudden silence, Will could hear the rising sound of panicked shouts and screams. Frantic footsteps passed right by the opening of the tent.

His first thought was of arrows, like the ones that had chased them from the forest. Maybe they were raining down on the camp as he lay there. Maybe Sascha was right in an archer's line of sight.

He pushed himself upright. Only one arm had the strength to do it. The other hung lifeless yet painful at his side. He couldn't move it, but his horror at the fact was only background noise to his fear of what was happening outside. Body stiff with lack of use, he swung his legs with difficulty on to the ground. They struggled to take his weight at first, and he swayed, falling back on to the pile of blankets that had served him for a bed. The shouting was getting louder, and it encouraged him to try again. Someone fell sprawling right outside the tent, but they wasted no time in resuming their desperate sprint.

Will pushed aside the tent flap with his good arm and the chaos outside presented itself in full. People were gathering up belongings and diving into the dropship. Some had stopped to help others. The air was tingling with fear. There were no arrows, so Will took an unsteady step outside. It was slow progress, walking against the flow of the milling crowd. Every face he scanned over was not Sascha's, and in a pain-fuelled panic, he made his way to the perimeter wall. He didn't have time to wonder where it had appeared from. The Pyro was bellowing orders somewhere near the gaping mouth of the dropship, and everyone was too busy piling inside to pay Will any mind as he slipped through one of the gaps in the half-built wall. If Sascha was inside, she was safe. But if she wasn't… Where had he left her? Who was she with? What kind of big brother was he?

The trees were just as confusing and astounding as when he saw them last. He stumbled over the roots even more often than before. The forest was eerily quiet, as though the wind did not even dare disturb the trees. The world was holding its breath.

"Sascha?" he called out, the words sticking in his dry throat.

A loud horn sounded in answer. No, not one, but several, blaring up in one continuous note from every side. The sound made his bones shake, but he clutched his injured arm tighter and carried on. The further into the trees he ventured, the more alone he felt. The cacophony of horns died suddenly, all at once, and an uneasy silence followed. A solid sense of dread settled into Will's stomach – the kind he could remember from his days on the Ark, whenever his father had cracked open another bottle of ancient whiskey and stumbled back into their quarters.

A skitter of leaves came from up ahead, followed by a rabbit who sped beneath his feet and off in the opposite direction. Its ears were shot back in fear. Will called out again, "Sascha?"

He didn't see it at first. And once he did, it didn't particularly register. A thick yellow mist, creeping across the ground, and slowly, slowly towards him.

Something came thundering through the brush, and Will dismissed it as another frightened animal until that same something grabbed at his shoulder. He felt skin, heard someone talk but didn't understand the words.

He turned, only to find himself staring into the face of a girl. She said something else, unintelligible, then tugged at him again. She threw a warning glance at the fog and when he didn't react, she looked for a moment like she might give up and go without him. But he followed, hesitantly at first, until he noticed the desperation with which she fled. He tried his best to match her pace. Each frantic step brought a fresh pain that ripped through his chest. It took him a while to realise that what they were running from – what the whole _forest_ seemed to be running from – was that acrid yellow gas.

"What is that?" he called out to the girl.

She didn't reply. A glance backwards revealed that the fog was hot on their heels. He suddenly felt afraid and pushed on, focusing instead on the dark curls of her hair as they bounced against her head. She was leaping and hopping around the trees as naturally as breathing, while he stumbled and floundered and struggled to keep up.

Without warning, she ducked. Will nearly went sprawling over her and she quickly set about parting some moss. She gave him an urgent look and he took it to mean that he should probably be helping. The sharp smell of the fog burnt his nostrils as it crept quietly on top of them. His skin prickled, and he would have called out in pain if he had to wait a moment longer. Then the moss came away all at once. Underneath lay a gaping hole. He didn't have time to wonder where the darkness led. The girl swung herself inside, and Will followed blindly.

He hit something, hard. It winded him and he lay sprawling inside the shallow hole which sounded oddly _metallic_ now he thought about it. The girl was fumbling with something up above. Whatever she did seemed to rob the hole of light, and when she sat down beside him he could hardly see her at all.

He felt around him, trying to gain some sense of his surroundings. The thing he had landed on was solid and long, protruding from the ground with no warning at all. It was a gear stick, he decided, and they were in a car. He let a laugh escape him – a chuckle of relief and bewilderment at the whole bizarre situation.

"Why do you laugh?"

Will looked up in surprise. He could see some of the girl's features now his eyes had adjusted. Her eyes were large and expressive. Right now they were brimming with something that looked like curiosity.

"I just… a _car_. I never thought I'd see one of these things, much less be hiding in one." He laughed again, his relief so great that he didn't immediately realise what was amiss. "Wait, I don't know you. And your accent… you can speak… Are you-?"

She nodded, a sharp movement with no room for misunderstanding. "Trikru. You are… Skaikru."

"What does that mean?"

"Sky people. You fell from the sky."

"I suppose we did. And you've… you've been here this whole time? Here on Earth?"

She turned away, occupying herself with the steering wheel in front of her. She held on to it as though she was about to drive the car right up out of the ground and far away from there. That image was the only thing more ridiculous than his question.

He realised he was sat in the passenger's seat, though thick vines and moss covered the seat, the controls around him rusted and broken. The hole they'd come through had been the sun roof, now sealed shut by the girl. The glove box was in front of him and he fiddled with it absent-mindedly. The lock was broken and it remained tightly closed.

"Are we safe in here?"

"For now."

"What is that stuff out there?"

"Yela trikova. It is a terrible thing."

"It doesn't look very dangerous."

In answer, she rolled up her sleeve and gestured for him to look. Hesitantly, he leaned closer, unable to see much in the dark. Then the burnished tones of her skin began to take shape, and he could see that her delicate forearm was littered with tiny blisters. The patch looked like the surface of the moon, mottled with tiny, darkened craters. The damage spread around her wrist and on to her hand, where it softly faded. The wound was decidedly old, but to Will it was obvious how painful it had once been.

"The fog," she said. "I was lucky. The fog can kill."

"Then you saved me. Thank you."

The girl replaced her sleeve, and gave a shrug. "You were hurt another way."

Will realised she was staring at the bloody bandage on his chest. The reminder of it made it sting anew. "Yeah, when we first got here. It was an arrow." She looked confused and he tried to draw one in the air. He only got halfway through the charade before she reached forward, gently brushing his hand aside. She went straight for the bandage, pulling it away to get a better look at the wound. She muttered something to herself before retreating. "It will not heal. Foto jus. Poison."

The word scared him. "I can't move my arm," he said, the words tumbling from his lips in a panic.

"The poison is in your blood. It will not kill. Just… stop." She mimed her arm being stuck to her side. "Then more and more." She made the same motion with her leg, then her head, then, in a soft gesture that chilled him to the bone, covered her eyes, and then her heart. "All will stop."

He swallowed the lump in his throat. "Can I be cured? Healed?"

"We can heal it. Sky people cannot."

"Please, you have to help me," Will said, feeling a surprising lack of shame in begging to a stranger, one that had saved his life once already. "I have a sister. If I die…"

The girl nodded again, brusque and strangely reassuring. "I can help you. But not now." She pointed up, towards the blocked sun roof.

"Right. The fog." He thought of smoggy tendrils creeping their way through the cracks in the car's rusty exterior, filling up the small space until his lungs were choking with it. It would have been easy for him to sink into panic, but he couldn't. Not then. "I'm Willard," he told the girl. Anything for a distraction. "I'm glad we met."

"Willard," she repeated, taking a moment to absorb the knowledge. Then she added, "Isadore."

The word, like many of her words, sounded strange, but somehow he knew that what he had learned was her name. "Isadore," he repeated, just the way she had. "Do you think your people did this to me?"

If he was expecting her to be secretive, he was quickly surprised. "Yes. Only my clan has this poison."

"Why would they try to kill us?"

"Some do not want you here. You are strangers. You are in our land. Some are afraid, but more want to fight."

"And you don't feel that way?"

Isadore shook her head. "No. But I am no warrior. I am only… teacher. To kill you would be final. No chance to learn. Learning is important to understand each other. Understanding means calm. Peace."

It was an uplifting thought, that there was at least one among the masses willing to give the young criminals a chance. But it was hard to image that Isadore could dissuade a whole army from descending on the camp, if they really were out for blood. Even she didn't seem too confident in that, for all her apparent bravery and smarts.

"How many of your people are there?"

"In our clan, hundreds. In all of the Trigeda, there are thousands."

"How many know we are here?"

"When your ship came, there was fire in the sky. Every person saw it fall."

He hadn't given much thought to how it must have looked when the dropship hit the atmosphere and burned up, bright as an exploding star. Their arrival had been a signal flare, a sign that had apparently been mistaken for war. These people knew the forest better than the delinquents ever could, they had weapons, food, _poisons_. And towards the One Hundred, they were a vicious mixture of fearful and hostile.

The gravity of the situation overwhelmed him and he could do nothing but wallow in silence under Isadore's searching gaze. She didn't wait long for him to speak, and instead climbed up on to the seat to inspect the sun roof. Will could only watch her numbly as she moved the cover aside and said, "We can go."

He tried to be pleased as she pulled herself up out of the car by the strength of her arms alone. He inhaled deeply before he attempted the same movement with only one good arm. He caught the edge and winced. The pain sprang up in his chest and he kicked out to try and find some footing. His boot connected with something and he heard a loud crack. The next second, his grip failed and he landed in a painful twist back in the passenger seat. He sat there gasping, clutching his paralyzed arm defensively.

Isadore's face appeared above. "Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine," he managed to answer, though he felt anything but. It was only when he scrambled upright, wincing, that he realised what he had kicked. The glove box was hanging open like a gaping jaw. At first he couldn't see anything of interest – some papers, old road maps, a case for glasses which was old and cracked. And then he saw the corner of a bag. It was clear and unassuming, made of plastic. He couldn't say what intrigued him enough to tug it free, but he did.

Suddenly, there in his hands, was a gun. It was black and compact, and had been placed in the bag along with a single cartridge of ammo. Will stared at it, dumb-founded. He had never held a gun in his life, not even by the corner of a plastic bag.

"Here," he heard Isadore say from above, and her arm extended through the sun roof. "I can help you up."

He panicked, oddly guilty about his new discovery. A sudden image of a thousand blood-soaked warriors descending on the camp flashed through his mind, and he glanced hastily between the gun and Isadore's outstretched hand. He stuffed the weapon into his waistband before she could see it.

"Th-Thanks," he stammered, before reaching out to take Isadore's hand. They emerged into the bright stillness of the day, an eerie silence the only clue that the fog had ever been there. He trailed behind Isadore as they picked their way through the empty forest, the feeling of the gun burning a darkened hole in his subconscious. He tried to pretend that it made him feel safer.


	12. Tiny Lungs

**12 – Tiny Lungs**

Her mind was made up. She'd let too many things distract her, but today was the day: she was going to find the medicine chest.

After her first full night's rest since she had been on Earth, Marlow went to the deadened campfire to pack her bag with rations and line her stomach for the day ahead. When she took her usual place next to Alfie, he was studying his wrist. It was still raw where the wristband had once choked it, the skin speckled with tiny, scabbed dots.

"Having second thoughts?" she asked, laying her tools on the ground in front of her. "Because I don't think it's going to snap back on all that easily."

He turned to her with his usual wolfish grin and knocked back a handful of the berries that had been passed around for breakfast. Marlow knew without asking that he'd already been up for hours.

"No regrets," he said determinedly.

They sat in companionable silence as they ate their small meal, both enjoying the vantage point of the camp from the tuft of the hill where they sat. They had shared so many meals in that same spot that the grass had parted to the shapes of their bodies – the sudden edges of Alfie's sprawled limbs where he usually reclined, and the soft bend of Marlow's crossed legs as she sat down to work. They moulded into those shapes as though they were blueprints of themselves during each meagre meal of the day.

"I'm really not going to change your mind, am I?" Alfie said, from where he lay with his arms behind his head. "You're not going to take yours off?"

She shook her head as much as she dared without drawing concentration away from her carving knife. She had made a few crude wooden knives for others around the camp, mostly the younger kids who had no other protection, but this knife – this one was for her. "No, and I know oxygen's not exactly scarce down here but still, don't waste your breath."

"I don't get it, Drift. I thought you were as glad to see the back of the Ark as I was."

"Oh, I _am._ No more bullshit rules or hypocritical leadership. No more daily fight for survival," she said, tossing some wood scraps on to the fire pit. The shavings settled among the ashes, perfect kindling for later. "Well, okay, maybe we're not _entirely_ free of that down here, but hey, at least we get to be oppressed and scared for our lives in a beautiful setting. It's just nice to finally belong somewhere, you know?"

Just beyond the careful cuts and flicks of her blade, she could see Alfie's russet eyes watching her intently.

"So what's keeping that shackle around your wrist?" he said. "It's not like you owe anyone up there anything. It's not like there's anyone watching out for you."

Her steady hand slipped, and her emotions with it.

Alfie must have sensed he'd struck a nerve. "Wait, I didn't mean –"

"No, you're right. I have no family," she agreed, digging the knife in to the wood. "At least not in the traditional sense. But I do have people who are counting on me, whether they realise it or not."

"I have no idea where you're going with all this cryptic introspection, but it's not anyone up there I'm concerned about. It's _your_ freedom I'm considering. You don't belong to them and this is the perfect way to prove it. Let me take it off for you. I've gotten pretty good at it."

"Only because you've been taking them off for other people, right?"

"How did you –?"

"We're a small group living in an even smaller space. Word travels, Alfie." She couldn't meet his eyes. Her knife moved faster, huge chunks of wood flying haphazardly across the ground. "Look, I know why freedom was important to you. I was happy to be able to give you that much. But you've _got_ to stop taking off the others'."

He sat up sharply. "You do realise I'm not forcing anyone to do this, right? These kids are coming to _me_. They don't want their shitty parents to know they're still alive. They're just like me – the Ark means nothing to them, and I hardly see how their need for independence falls under your jurisdiction."

"Because the Ark is dying, Alfie!" Her tools hit the ground like lightning. She kept her hands curled around them, knuckles white from the pressure.

"What?" He scowled. Marlow could almost see how his mind was turning over her words.

"I should have told you before, before you made the decision to cut yours off." She sighed, and tried to gather her thoughts. "Aggie figured it out. Whoever made the calculations for oxygen on the Ark was wrong. There were supposed to be years of life left in the old tin can yet, but things are desperate. Oxygen supplies are likely to run dry within two months at best. The Ark is no longer sustainable. They need those wristbands to determine whether Earth is a safe alternative."

For half a minute, she could have sworn it looked like Alfie gave a damn. And then, suddenly, "So?"

" _So?"_ she repeated. " _So_ your mother is on that ship. Your father. Thousands of perfectly innocent people who will die if we don't prove to the Ark that they can come here. If they keep seeing the wristband signals blinking out, they'll assume we're all dying because of Earth's conditions."

"It's difficult to care when we're being used as nothing but lab rats," Alfie answered, his voice as sour as acid. "They sent us here knowing that we could die. Why should I care if they meet the same fate?"

"I'm not even asking for you to care," Marlow said, throwing her hands up in the air with disbelief. "God knows we can't expect the Suicide King to rise from his throne for the sake of us lesser mortals. I'm just asking you to leave the other wristbands. This is bigger than your mommy issues."

In one quick motion, she tossed her tools, weapon and food into her bag. They mixed together in a jumble, just like her feelings. Swinging the bag over her shoulder, she made to walk away.

"Where are you going?" Alfie snapped. She knew he hated to be left in the middle of an argument, and that was exactly why she did it.

"Away," she answered, without a second look at him. "I'll be back when you've grown yourself a backbone."

She headed straight into the forest, wincing when she heard Alfie hit something in the distance. She hoped it wasn't another person.

She'd hoped to ask him along on this expedition – Alfie was the camp's self-designated scout, and he knew the woods better than anyone. But he needed some time. She knew he'd rant and rave at her comments for a couple of hours, and vehemently deny to himself that there was even a scrap of truth in what she had said. He'd probably pick a fight with someone, just to take his mind off things. Then, in the cold, numb aftermath of the adrenaline, he'd begin to realise deep down that she was right. Not that he'd ever admit to it. As long as he left the other wristbands alone, that was as much as she could ask for.

She had to admit, she needed some time alone herself. The angry buzz of Alfie's thoughts and the nagging clamour of the camp left her craving the quiet windings of the forest. She tucked her freshly carved knife into her back pocket so she could run her hands across the barks of the trees she passed. She liked to think about the creatures that called them home. Each tree had hundreds, thousands of lifeforms large and small clamouring for life inside them. From the rust-coloured squirrel that nestled in the higher branches, to the tiny line of ants tiptoeing obediently over the wooden knots. Every action they took was a starving grasp at life, a hungry breath in tiny lungs. Each tree was an Ark all of its own, the animals blundering through its insides just the way she had in her old home.

When she started to see more debris, charred and blackened from the dropship's descent, she turned her eyes downwards. She kicked aside the remnants of a thruster casing and it left her shoe filthy with ash. Her only hope was that the medicine chest had fallen first, before the flames and destruction had begun. Of course that would also mean it would be further afield, and by extension, further into Grounder territory.

She didn't feel particularly threatened at the moment though. How could she, with the world so bright and infinite around her? All was silent, all was well. She adjusted the strap of her bag and kept on walking, enjoying the freshness of the new day.

The debris grew more frequent, then thinned out once again. Some of the scraps seemed to be in better condition than the others, but they were still scorched around the edges. Gently pushing aside some underbrush, she saw something that looked like a roll of gauze. She bent to examine it, and it crumbled in her hands.

"Guess the acid fog didn't do you much good, huh?" she grimaced, pushing down her guilt for not beginning her search sooner. Who knew what the rest of the kit would look like by now?

She stood, turning in a full circle to check out her surroundings. It must be close now, she told herself.

The remains of the gauze fell from her hands like snow. She waded into a thicket, choked with tall plants that softly stung her as she passed. There was the edge of something that could have been a grey box, poking out from between the green. She took a step towards it.

Something grabbed at her ankle. All at once the world turned to a blur. Her stomach lurched and her body went with it as she was snatched into the air. She was too winded to call out, too dizzy to make sense of what had happened. Her head throbbed from the pressure as she began to realise she was upside down. She pushed aside her long hair to catch a glimpse of her ankle. A thick cord was wrapped around it, the other end to a tree branch. She could tell from the pain that she had sprained it.

"A goddamn trap," she scolded herself, breathless. "You survive the fall from space to Earth and you get yourself caught in damn hunter's trap. Nice going, Mars."

Wearily, she snaked her hand up across her back and into her back pocket. Fortunately the knife had stayed put, though the rest of her belongings were scattered across the forest floor. Gearing her muscles for the strain, she folded her body upwards, bringing her hands towards her feet. Quickly she started to saw away the rope, all the while trying to ignore the nagging feeling that the trap was more expertly crafted than anything she had seen their camp's hunters use.

Each attempt at the rope was short and painful, with frequent rests where she could do nothing more than hang there and let the blood rush to her head. The knot was clinging on by threads by the time she took her fourth rest. Her body ached from the exertion and her heart beat in her ears. That was when she saw a shadow fall on the ground beneath her.

"Thank goodness someone showed up," she said to the shadow, feeling as though her eyes were swollen to twice their usual size. "I think I'll live down the total humiliation of this, but please, just cut me down, will you?"

The person was silent as they moved behind her, out of sight. Her stomach lurched anew.

"I was actually out looking for the medicine chest," she explained to the stranger, straining to hear the dull rasp of their breath. "I know, I know. A fool's errand. But with all those people wounded back at camp, I at least had to… _try!_ "

The last word came out as half a scream as the stranger let her fall roughly to the ground. Her spine took most of the beating, but at least she'd saved her head. The world whirled for a second time that day, until something large and dark blotted out the sun.

The face that stared down at her was thick with dirt. It wore a stony expression.

The same instant she realised it was a Grounder was the same moment a scream ripped from her throat. In response, the huge figure swept her up, and tossed her over its shoulder, as though she were nothing more than a sack of downy feathers. She punched and kicked but her attacks bounced off the stranger as though they didn't feel them at all.

She called out, knowing she was too far from camp for anyone to hear her. She carried on anyway, desperately trying to claim someone's, anyone's, attention. The Grounder only stood a few moments of the shouting before something fabric and foul-tasting was shoved into her mouth. It tasted like human sweat and she gagged, noticing with an overwhelming sense of despair that they had walked right past the medicine chest. It was open, ransacked, and empty.


	13. Straight On 'Til Morning

**13 – Straight On 'Til Morning**

He'd been here before, staring into the mouth of his rigid fear. Long ago, when he was a child.

Loren hesitated around it now just as he had back then, when his friends had been piling inside the tiny square of the air vent and urging him to follow. He swallowed the lump in his throat and pushed the long curls of his hair back into his bandana. The hole had seemed bigger all those years ago, although admittedly he had grown since then. Loren was tall for his eighteen years, all awkward long limbs and hair that seemed to have a life of its own.

In other words, he was exactly the wrong shape and size to be crawling through the tiny tunnels that had haunted his nightmares for years. But he had a job to do, and he had made a promise to see it through. Trust had been placed in him and no childhood phobia would make him betray that. He turned the box over in his pocket, the thing Julia had given him that seemed almost unremarkable. A memory of the pain in the Councillor's eyes made him wonder once again just how much difference this small treasure could truly make. There was only one way to find out.

The grate remained as loose as it had always been, though Loren knew no one had used the route for years. He pulled it off with ease, and shone his small flashlight into the tunnel. The light bounced infinitely off the metallic walls, creating reflections of reflections and making his chest feel ever tighter.

Gripping the flashlight between his teeth, he put his first uneasy arm inside. The other soon followed, then his head and his legs, as he tried not to imagine some great beast swallowing him whole. The medical bag on his back scraped the roof and he shivered with the urge to run. He crawled the first narrow corridor with his eyes closed, as if that would help. He opened them when he began to picture the walls shrinking in on him. Breathing heavily, he checked the Ark blueprints he had borrowed from engineering and folded himself carefully into the right corridor.

Distant sounds echoed through the shaft – usually the whir and hum of the Ark's internal workings, but every now and then he could hear voices. He stopped only to listen to the first conversation, afraid that he might be heard clambering clumsily through the walls. He eventually decided the voices were too far away, and he crawled on, licking at his dry lips with determination.

Emerging into a crossroads was almost a blessing, when the corridors went off into long stretches on three or sometimes four sides. He sat down, trying to get comfortable. If only the roof didn't touch his head and the floor didn't make his legs cramp painfully. He remained at the junction long enough to take a hasty drink from his rucksack, but his hands were shaking so violently that he spilt it and started to choke. He began picturing himself gasping for breath, hands clutching at his throat as all the air was sucked from the metallic tunnels and he was left to suffocate there, alone. Who would ever find him here? His vision narrowed and the walls and floor seemed to compress, to squash him like metallic jaws. He gave up then. He stuffed his things into his backpack and turned back the way he came. Then he remembered from the blueprint that his destination was closer now than the entrance would ever be again. The quickest way to escape this hell was to reach the end. He took one, two, steadying breaths, and crawled onwards, down the corridor to his left.

He went quicker now, his desperation mounting. He tried to move his arms and legs to a rhythm, but he kept on stumbling. The exit was up ahead and he was so caught up in his relief that he dropped his flashlight. For a dizzying moment, the light span around the metallic walls, then cut out completely. In the dark he felt painfully, hopelessly sick. He searched the floor with his hands, catching hold of the torch only to send it spinning away again with a terrible clatter. He followed the sound, fighting against his every instinct and crawled forward into the dark abyss. He found it, thanked whatever divine spirit was watching over him, and knocked it against his hand until the light flickered to life once more. The exit was closer than he anticipated. The torch revealed the metal grate that covered his way out. Putting it back between his teeth, he pulled the tiny socket screwdriver and got to work, jimmying away the screws the way he'd seen the older kids do all that time ago.

Flakes of rust came away with the grate as he pushed it outward. In his haste to escape, he went with it, tumbling forward to fall with an enormous crash to the ground. He spent a moment shaking on his hands and knees, taking deep, calming breaths. He could have kissed the ground.

The first thing that hit him was the cold. There was no sense in providing temperature control to an area no one used any more. Even the oxygen there was thinner – the fact that the section had any at all was by virtue of the fact that it was connected to one of the outer engineering bays.

Which made him think: with all of the noise he had made coming in, it wouldn't be long until someone nearby came to investigate. He had to work quickly. He touched the box in his pocket, as though for luck, and tried to focus his eyes in the darkness. If memory served him, there was a row of six tiny escape pods in this sector. He felt his way along the icy metal wall until he found the one he knew best.

The pod was small, perhaps only room enough for two. Loren could remember the days when eight teenagers used to cram inside there, each of them balanced in whatever precarious position they could find. It was the only place to enjoy some privacy away from the Ark's over-bearing rules and even stricter parents. The evidence of their time here was still littered around the pod – old cans and empty packets of smuggled junk food. The last few drops in an old bottle of moonshine had dried up and encrusted to the glass. Loren had been made to drink from that bottle, after he'd had a sudden panic attack from crawling through the tunnels. The others had thought it would calm him. He hadn't been able to keep food down for three days afterwards.

Brushing past the remnants of his memories, Loren sat down at the control panel and pulled out a manual. It was more like a cheat sheet, drawn in a rough hand by one of Aggie's friends in engineering. He didn't question Loren's need for the information, and why would he? When Loren Matthews asked for something, it could only be for a good, entirely legal, reason. How shocked people would be if they could see him now. Breaking and entering was hardly his usual hobby.

All the numbers and arrows of the manual swam before his eyes. He was a medic, not a pilot, and it took him a careful few minutes of matching hand-drawn impressions to the actual control panel in front of him. He tried to think of it like a human body – a rib here, a vein there – and the cheat sheet like one of the anatomy books he had studied for hours during his training. They never looked like the real thing either. Surprisingly, the method began to help. He flicked a switch and the panel lit up. A soft whir began somewhere in the background. Right outside the panoramic window was a set of closed metal doors. The first stage of the airlock. The door to the pod still sat open behind him. One set of doors to open, and one to close, then things got simple from there. Just one mighty long fall.

He turned a dial that he thought looked right. The pod made an angry sound in response. He panicked, switched it back down. Then he heard a thud from outside.

The entrance door to the docking bay was opening. Loren froze, waiting to see who would appear. At first, no one did. Then came the nose of an electric prod, and Loren knew the guards had found him.

He buckled his safety belt, hands shaking. He had to made this quick. He counted four sets of footsteps entering the docking bay. With his nose almost pressed flat to his cheat sheet, he searched for a scribble that might help him close those doors.

"This one!" A voice came, echoing around the abandoned section.

"Citizen," shouted another voice, more authoritative. "Come out with your hands raised."

Tossing the paper aside, Loren swapped logic for luck. He hammered some buttons. They lit, one by one, with painful slowness. The pod grew brighter still, illuminating him like a searchlight. The footsteps came quicker.

"This is your final warning! We will have to use force!"

Loren glanced over his shoulder just as that prod appeared at the door. A face came with it, hardened and furious. With trembling hands, Loren grabbed the first lever he could find and yanked it down. The door slid shut, and forced the guard backwards. His angry face appeared at the small window and Loren could hear the muffled sound of him shouting orders to the others.

He'd brought himself some time. He grabbed the crumpled sheet and found the air lock controls by laying the diagram flat on top of the panel. He flicked one, two switches, then one final button. The doors began to pull aside with a triumphant, drawn-out squeal.

The lights in the pod flickered and Loren realised that the guards were trying to cut the power. He willed the doors to go faster, to not let his luck run out just yet.

The lights cut out. The control panel went dead. At the same moment, the ejectors pushed the pod forward. Frenzied shouts followed him into the air lock. The doors began to close again and Loren let out a tense breath as the control panel flickered to life once more. He smiled as he spotted the scribble on his diagram that read 'reserve power'.

The hatch in front was all that separated him now from space and as he stared at them, he supressed his natural instinct to flee. Where could he go now anyway, but down? Everything was automated. His fate was set.

Suddenly he was staring into blackness. Stars danced before his eyes, taunting him onwards. The thrusters engaged, throwing him into space with a force that pushed him back against his uncomfortable chair. Then all was swept into a sweet, tense silence as the pod tilted dizzyingly towards its destination.

Through the long window, Earth rose slowly into view. It was odd, to be looking down on the planet with the knowledge that he was now falling towards it. Thanks to the simulated gravity, he could have believed he wasn't moving at all.

Nothing happened for a long time. It was agonizing. The stillness gave him too much time to think. He began to realize how small the pod was, and the belt soon felt as though it wanted to squeeze the life out of him.

There was a crackle of static. The radio was transmitting, an indistinct chatter that gradually became a voice as the pod honed in on the sound.

"…there? Please, Loren. Can you… me? Are you there? Please answer, please…"

It was his mother. The bastards had called her in to reason with him.

"I'm here, Mom. I'm fine," he answered, with a confidence he didn't feel. "Please try not to worry. There's something I have to do. I promise I'll be okay."

"Loren? Please speak to me."

"I'm here!"

"…hear me? If you can, please… back. You don't… do this."

She couldn't hear him. He couldn't answer the call. He pressed as many buttons as he could while the radio still had the signal. "Mom? Mom, are you there?"

Then there was silence. He realised he may have left her behind for good. Would Julia tell her what had become of him? If she didn't, the guards surely would. He hoped they'd be gentle about it. She didn't deserve to have her heart broken.

Earth absorbed all of his thoughts when it loomed large in the window. As it grew closer, the feeling of falling became harder to ignore. His speed picked up, or at least he could have sworn it had.

He checked the diagram again, used it to adjust the conditions for descent. He was entering the atmosphere and the risks were high. With one hand on the thruster controls, he sent a silent plea to whatever mysterious force had gotten him this far.

 _Let me feel the ground beneath my feet,_ he begged.

He pulled back the lever, and closed his eyes.

Then he opened them again. Nothing had happened. The thrusters were supposed to push him past the atmosphere, stop him burning up. Yet here he was, hurtling freefall to the ground, and the engines were as silent as the grave. He pulled the lever again, more desperately. He tried to consult the cheat sheet but the pod began to shake too much for him to read. Something hit the window and he realised with a jolt that it was part of the pod. It was falling to pieces. The ancient metal box accelerated sharply and Loren suddenly, somehow, found the sequence.

In a fiery trail, the pod pushed forward so forcefully that Loren's forehead connected with the control panel. The lights guttered out at last and Loren was left to fall screaming to the ground.

Earth met him in a rush of colour and smoke, but he was not awake to see it.


	14. A Little Medicine

**14 – 'A Little Medicine'**

 _Alfie was fifteen. He was returning to his family's quarters with his pockets full of spoils. He'd only keep one or two for himself, that was the deal. The rest would go to Marlow, and that scrawny kid he kept seeing in his classes. Evidence of the food shortage was too apparent, but never in the Seabrooke household._

 _He checked his watch just before pushing his thumb against the access panel on the quarter doors. Classes had finished almost two hours ago. It didn't matter. He could lie as easily as breathing._

 _Strolling through the door with his satchel still on his shoulder, he barely registered the eerie silence that greeted him. Then, a small, cracked voice, floating down the corridor._

 _"Alfie?"_

 _"Mom? Where are you?"_

 _He rounded in to the kitchen, laid out just the same as the quarters of every other Council family on that deck. Their worktops were high-finish steel, bright with expensive luminaire lighting, ovens where no cooking was done, and a neat dinette in the same right corner. That was where he found his mother._

 _Her wheelchair had tilted sideways, tipping her out on to the titanium floor. One of the stools at the dinette lay next to her, evidence that she'd tried to save herself from the fall. A deep purple bruise was blossoming on her cheek._

 _Alfie dropped his bag, panic swelling inside him. "Mom? What happened? Are you alright?"_

 _She nodded firmly, none of her confidence shaken. "It all happened so fast. I was trying to –"_

 _She looked up, right up, to the dinette and the place where her oxygen mask sat. Not for the first time, Alfie cursed the people who'd built the Ark. Even their own quarters were not adapted to Julia's needs. Everything was too high, too far, too awkwardly shaped for a wheelchair to manoeuvre around._

 _He saved his worst curses for himself. He'd been the one who'd forgotten to hand her the mask before he left that morning. He'd been too caught up in the detail, maintaining the lie that he was, in fact, going to class._

 _How long had she been lying there?_

 _Alfie grabbed her arm, but he wasn't strong enough to lift her. She tried to push up with him, to help, but her breathlessness left her weaker than ever. He hooked the mask down to where they sat instead, hosed it up to the tank, adjusted the air flow, and held it gently to her face. She blinked slowly at him, in the way that always meant 'thank you'._

 _He couldn't even bring himself to acknowledge her gratitude. He hadn't been there, and so this was his fault. He wanted to say so, to tell her why he hadn't been there and that he'd never do it again. His fingers rustled at the stolen ration packs inside his pockets, as though he meant to pull one out in demonstration. But words were strangled down inside him those days, in a way they'd never used to be. There was a time when he would have told his mother anything. He tried to say it now, with a look in place of a promise:_ This was the last time. I won't leave you again.

 _After a few moments of Julia's careful breathing, Alfie passed her arm over his shoulders and tried to push her up again. His legs buckled and he gave in. He sat beside her and rested her head in his lap instead of on the cold edge of the floor. That was where his father found them when he strode in a short while later._

 _Kevin Seabrooke hovered darkly in the kitchen doorway, before swooping forward to snatch Julia from Alfie's hands. He lifted her back into her chair as though she didn't weigh a thing. He stroked her face, her hair, asked her thousand soft questions, all with his back turned to Alfie._

 _Alfie waited with the oxygen tank in one hand. He held it til his muscles burned, but he refused to put it down. He listened closely to his parents' whispered conversation until something was finally said for his benefit, loud and cutting._

 _"I just ran into your teacher," his father said. "He said you hadn't been in your classes today. Again."_

 _This wasn't the time for this. "Don't you think –"_

 _"Don't I think_ what _, Alfie? I know what I think, and I know very well what your mother thinks. You're nurturing a very bad attitude at the moment, when what you should be nurturing are your studies."_

 _"It doesn't matter if –"_

 _"Yes, it does matter if you're absent for one day," Kevin said, finally looking him in the eye. A vicious vein in his temple began to throb. "It matters if you're absent for two days, three days, four days, and it certainly matters if you've been playing truant for the last_ fourteen _occasions you've been missing from class."_

He doesn't understand, _Alfie thought, fixing his stare on his father all because he knew Kevin expected him to look away in shame. How_ could _he understand? He'd never seen the hungry look in that scrawny kid's eyes. He'd never seen the way Marlow's mouth watered the first time she'd seen chocolate. Councillor Kevin Seabrooke had never gone without. He probably didn't even realise a world existed outside of his own personal airspace._

 _"Do I really need to remind you once again that as our son, you have a reputation to uphold? We're respected public figures and we do not need your discrepancies darkening our careers. Your mother could very well be the next Chancellor. Just imagine what you're doing to our chances!"_

 _Kevin Seabrooke had never had to put up with a bully who made his classmates' lives a living hell. No one had ever told_ him _his mother was a useless cripple, a pointless waste of precious oxygen. He'd never had to bite his tongue so hard he'd tasted blood, as that snivelling weasel denounced the worth of the person who meant more to him than all the life on the Ark combined._

 _"And if the thought of that doesn't appeal to your selfish nature, think about what you're doing to your own prospects. You think you're going to be allowed a seat on the Council when you can't even find the respect to attend your lessons?"_

 _Kevin Seabrooke had never known how much easier it was to run away, go and steal rations, hang out in the disused docking stations, than to give in to the rising anger he could feel building day by day inside him. This was not Kevin Seabrooke's world, but it was Alfie's. Every hot red choking second of it._

 _"And I suppose my teacher didn't mention that I've aced every test I've sat since the beginning of the year?" Alfie snapped. "I suppose he didn't mention that I've been mentoring some of the younger kids to help them get better grades? And I suppose no one said a damn thing when I had three weeks out of class to care for Mom after the last bad fall she had?"_

 _Julia looked guilty, but it was as though a wall had gone up between them. He didn't care. Why should he, when she couldn't even speak a word to fight his corner? He always fought hers._

 _Alfie shoved his hands into his pockets so his father couldn't see his fists clench. They were still full of the chocolates and rations he'd liberated from the stores. To think he'd considered stopping. Why should he? He was helping people, and that was more than he could say for his passionless father._

 _He stormed out before Kevin found a retort – not because he had anywhere to go, but because he knew it was almost curfew and the fact would drive Kevin crazy._

 _The next day, he had been arrested for breaking the bully's jaw. His parents would reel from the news, but it would come as no bigger surprise than to Alfie himself._

He awoke with the sticky scent of moonshine clinging to his sweating skin. His mouth felt bone-dry. Outside, the night's frivolities continued without him. Bitter and alone, he'd drank more of the Earth-brewed liquor than he'd intended, still bristling from his argument with Marlow that morning. He'd collapsed in his tent early without much of a word to anyone.

The dream about his parents came back to him in a wash of anger and he hurled his blankets against the canvas as though they had caused it. Suddenly oppressed by the stale air of the tent, he stormed out, back into the night.

The fires were burning low, but the party showed no sign of stopping. People were everywhere. One taste of freedom and their thirst for it became insatiable. Now they were free of the Ark, they craved freedom from other things – freedom from their newfound responsibilities, from their fear of the Grounders. Freedom from their daily fight for survival.

Alfie stalked through the camp, taking shadows to avoid the crowds, until a voice found him in the darkness.

"Yo, Councillor! Where's your girlfriend?"

It was Jareth, from his self-appointed place at the leader's fire. Raucous laughter followed his comment. The group were passing around the rest of the remaining moonshine, taking more than the lion's share.

"Probably off findin' some Grounder to get sweet on," The Pyro continued to his captive audience. "She's made of the same crazy stock, right? She'd fit in better with them than a spoiled council kid." He followed with some lewd gestures, painting a graphic picture of Marlow and an imaginary Grounder lover.

 _Good_ , Alfie thought. Someone had been stupid enough to provoke him. The current of his blood was rushing in reverse. A fight was exactly what he needed to shift those lingering hurts of his life before Earth.

A hand clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't."

He looked around, half expecting Marlow. Who he actually saw was Flo, the camp's medic. "The fight would be ten to one and you're not exactly in a fighting state."

"So I should just sit back and let him get away with this shit?" Alfie retorted. His words were slurring.

"God, no. Not at all," Flo said, leading him gently out of The Pyro's range. "In fact, I've been wondering when you were going to knock him on his ass. Everyone hates his leadership, you know."

Alfie shrugged. "I don't know anyone else who'd want the job. Besides, he's not really hurting anyone. If he wants to call himself a leader to excuse being an ass, let him."

"Alright, so you got me there. But when the time comes for tough decisions, you know as well as I do that he's not gonna make them." Flo cut her brown eyes at him, sideways. "That's when we could use someone with leadership in their blood."

He didn't want to bite at that one. "Why are you here?"

"Business as always," Flo grinned, fidgeting with the frills of her skirt. "Okay so, I don't want you to freak out, but Marlow hasn't come back from the forest."

"She went looking for the medicine chest? _Alone?_ "

"It looks that way. She told me she wouldn't, but… here we are."

He wanted to be angry with her for not asking him to go, but a thick feeling of worry was coiling itself around his stomach. He could feel it underneath the latent tingle of the moonshine. There was something else there too: the memory of the dream, of the last time he'd not been there for someone he cared about.

"I'm going to look for her," he said, slinging his weapon holster over his shoulder.

"Now cool your jets," Flo said, following him to his feet. "Marlow's a big girl, she can last through 'til morning. Heading out in the dark would be suicide."

The word struck a chord with him. "Then it's exactly what she'd expect me to do."

He didn't look back as he walked away, an urgent step in his stride. His mind was already calculating where she would have gone, how long it would take to reach her. He had his machete in his hand by the time Flo caught up.

"Alright, listen. If you're insisting on going, I'm coming with you. Marlow's out there for me, for all of us. I'll be damned if I'm going to leave her to her own devices."

"I'll move faster by myself."

"You'll also cover more ground if there's two of us."

Alfie couldn't argue with her logic, especially not when his faculties were drowning under moonshine. Just as he thought things couldn't get any worse, Will appeared from the shadows.

"I'm coming."

"No," Alfie said, without hesitation.

"I heard what you were saying and I want to help," Will said. "Marlow watched over me while I was unconscious and I need to pay that back somehow."

Flo looked over him searchingly. "Will, speaking as your medic, I can't encourage you to leave the camp with your arm still like that. You need rest until we can determine the cause of your paralysis," she said. "But, speaking as your _friend_ … we'd appreciate the help. Just stay close, alright? Hey! Alfie, wait!"

Alfie had already stepped into the forest, and was immediately blinded by the darkness. Between the trees, the night was thick and full of pitfalls. Then Will followed, with a fiery torch he'd snagged from the camp. Alfie took it from him with a grateful nod, and slowed just enough for his companions to follow.

They traced the breadcrumb trail of debris in the direction Marlow would have gone. Tracks were quickly eaten by the flickering firelight and Alfie was fast without a clue. He whirled around in frustration, searching each tree and bush for a sign of disturbance. The thought of Marlow, lost and alone in this impenetrable night was more than his panicked mind could bear. He quickly sobered in the face of his adrenaline.

"Where the hell is she?" he growled, to no one in particular.

"She can't have just vanished," Will said, ever the frustrating voice of reason. He hadn't done anything wrong, but Alfie suddenly relished the thought of rearranging his face.

"We need a plan," Flo began. "Wandering blind into the dark won't get us anywhere. Firstly, we should… What the hell is _that?_ "

Alfie followed Flo's gaze, thinking she'd spotted something in the trees. But she was looking up, through the treetops, through to the star-filled night. Between the canopy of leaves overhead, a streak of fire split the sky.

"The Ark…?" Will wondered aloud.

But the distant light of their former home still twinkled softly, miles above. Whatever this was, it was descending, and quickly. It was on a collision course with Earth.

Alfie ran towards it with his neck craned skywards, trying to track the trail through the trees. One moment he would lose it, the next it would burn suddenly brighter, marking its position obviously through the forest canopy. Will and Flo ran behind him, but he couldn't stop to check on their progress now. If Marlow could see that, she'd be heading there too. He sprinted, tripping over tree roots, but the falling fire never seemed any closer. The elusive end of the rainbow.

The flames disappeared into the trees and suddenly Alfie was lost. He turned and turned and turned, trying to figure out which way he should run. Then the ground rumbled beneath him and he was nearly knocked off his feet. He had been too close. He hadn't even seen where it had fallen. He felt his confidence shrivel inside him as he floundered, lost and unable to go on.

A tremendous rustle of leaves came like a chorus from behind him.

"This way!" Will was shouting, pointing with his good arm. Off Alfie went, propelled by his urgency. He glanced back only occasionally to check Will's directions until an acrid smell of burning fuel became his guide instead. It wormed its way through the trees, a cloying grey smog following close behind. The deadly trail let him straight to the scene of the crash.

Alfie blundered in without a moment's thought, but Flo caught up to push a square of torn fabric into his hands. A matching piece was covering her nose and mouth. He copied, breathing air deeply through the material. He followed the glowing light through the trees. Blurred out by the smoke, it seemed to be coming from all around them. Alfie pushed through to the centre point, where the heat stung his skin and the light was almost blinding. Whatever had hit the ground was now up in tall, scorching flames, lending its destruction to the trees that surrounded it. A smudged silhouette of a person stood watching the wreckage.

"Drift?" Alfie called out. But the shape was wrong – the hair was short, the build too big.

"Sorry, Councillor. Your girlfriend's not here."

"Jareth? What is this?"

"It fell from the sky," The Pyro explained, his eyes alight with the brightness of the flames. "It's a ship."

Flo pushed forward. "Is there someone inside?"

"If there is, they're beef jerky by now."

Will was coughing and spluttering somewhere behind them. "Over there!" He paused for breath. "Someone… running!"

"Ain't no way," The Pyro said, a dreamlike quality to his voice that made him sound like an old man reminiscing on times gone by. "Ain't no one who could run after this."

Alfie wasn't thinking of the passenger. There was every chance that shadowy figure could be Marlow, and he set out in pursuit. The fire singed the hair on his arms as he ran headlong through the wreck. The trees and the darkness provided cover for the runner, and Alfie struggled to keep pace. He tried to shout out, but the person ignored him. They seemed huge, swaying heavily underneath the weight of something as they sped away, navigating artfully through the trees.

Without even stopping, the person whirled around and threw something in Alfie's direction. He wasn't quick enough to dodge even though the shot was clumsy. The thing grazed his arm. It was a knife, and the person who threw it was a Grounder. The light had just shifted enough for Alfie to get an impression of bright, hostile eyes, and the shape of someone slung over the stranger's shoulder.

They rounded in to a mossy clearing, Alfie almost certain he had cornered them. But the Grounder had slipped away, into whatever rat tunnels those people crawled through.

Alfie kicked the dirt, sending a rabbit with three misshapen ears skittering away in a cloud of dust.

"Anything?" Flo asked, when he returned to the site of the wreckage. Her arms were sooty up to the elbows. No doubt she had been searching for a body in the places where the fire was weakest.

"They got away," Alfie said, clutching his injured arm. "But at least now I know what I have to do."

"And what's that, Councillor?" The Pyro was somehow able to look away from the flames long enough to say. "Don't forget, you don't do anything without _my_ say so."

Alfie's hand held the knife that had hit him, retrieved from the forest floor. It was strikingly familiar, roughly carved and made of wood. "With or without your say so, _commander_ – I'm going to the Grounder camp. They've got Marlow."


	15. The Hollow

**15 – 'The Hollow'**

Loren's head was pounding from the moment he opened his eyes. He didn't need his medical training to know that he had concussion.

He became aware of his injuries one by one, and began cataloguing them as he would with any patient he was expected to treat. There was a deep laceration in his right side, just below his epigastrium. His wrist was at least sprained, maybe broken – it was hard to tell with ropes thick around his hands. His hair felt matted and sticky, probably with blood from the wound that had caused his concussion. His legs felt numb, and for a moment he panicked that they weren't there at all. Through his hazy thoughts he realised it was down to the position he had been bound in – on his knees, as though in prayer. He shifted them and with a hot spreading pain, he discovered the burns on his shins, second-degree at best.

Feeling intensely sick and thirsty, but satisfied he was in no immediate medical danger, Loren turned his attention to his surroundings. The wall he faced was odd. It was not metal, like all the walls he had ever known in his life. It was solid, inconsistent in its various colours and patterns that seemed to move and stretch in the firelight. He was close enough to press his cheek to it, so he did, using it to investigate in place of his restrained hands. The wall was cold, slightly slimy. Was this… rock?

Earth! That was right, he had come to Earth!

He smiled, though it made his cracked lips sting. He'd actually made it. And to think his first sight of this brave new world was a rock wall two inches from his face.

The air tasted wet, of something organic. He sucked at it hungrily, calculating that he'd been without food or water for roughly forty-eight hours.

But if he really was on Earth, who would have done this to him?

Starved, bound, with his wounds untreated… he knew some of the young criminals would be less than pleased to see him, but he had been expecting a warmer welcome than _this_.

He tried to loosen his bindings. Now he was here, he had a job to do. His hands were stuck fast behind his back, unable to reach the treasure in his inside pocket. His skin itched from the movement, and he realised his burns must be more severe than he first thought.

He heard footsteps, and immediately tried to shuffle around to see who was coming.

"Hello?" he called out, as loud as he dared. "You might not recognise me, but I swear I don't mean you any harm. It's me, I'm Loren Matthews, the medical apprentice. I know what the Ark did to you all, but I want you to know I don't condone it. I came here to help you! I was sent by –"

Someone hit him on the back of the head. He saw his blood spatter against the wall.

While he was still reeling, his assailant span him around. The person was holding a flaming torch that blinded him at first. Between squinting and blinking, Loren began to understand the face he saw before him.

He wasn't one of the One Hundred. Firstly, he was far too old – probably early thirties. It was just so hard to tell under all that war paint. Loren had seen plenty of old-Earth documentaries about prehistoric hunters and the way they decorated themselves to seem more unsettling to their prey, and this man didn't need the blood-red markings that covered his face. Loren was already unsettled by the look in his deep-set eyes. His clothes were patchwork, and caked with dirt. Most striking of all was his hair – black, swept to one side, to better expose the animal skin pattern that was closely-shaved against his skull. Loren didn't know this man, but he knew that he frightened him.

"P-Please…" he said, feebly, though he wasn't quite sure what he was about to beg for. His life? Some information? Just a sip of water?

The man gave him a warning look and backed away, revealing the room in full.

It would have been circular, if it had a man-made shape. The erraticness of the walls and their sudden jutting sides told Loren this was a _cave_. It felt like an old word, and he'd never really understood its meaning until now. Even the floor was wall, and there was no sky to speak of. The space was big enough not to trigger his phobia, but he still felt buried and hopeless. His chest tightened horribly.

There was nothing else in the cave, except for the person strung up like a doll right next to him. He almost leapt out of his skin. Her appearance was so sudden, though she had obviously been there all along. Her head was slumped, yellow-blonde hair tumbling in tangled waves over her face. Her arms and legs were bound separately, apart, leaving her standing like a suffering starfish.

The man produced a dirty container of water and pressed it roughly to the girl's lips. She awoke suddenly, lifting her head to drink desperately from the sudden gush of water. She was pallid and trembled softly where she hung. Starved, Loren diagnosed. As soon as the man pulled the cup away, the girl was out again.

"She needs food," Loren said, remembering to wear his best expression for telling patients news they did not want to hear. "And possibly medicine. If you have my bag, I could –"

The man pressed the cup to Loren's lips mid-sentence, and he almost choked on the water. He gulped it down as best as he could. Then the man began to gather his things and grabbed his torch.

"Please!" Loren called to his back. The water had reinvigorated his bravery. "Just bring her some food. I don't know what you want with her but she'll be no good to you if she's dead."

The man muttered something Loren didn't understand, and left, taking the light with him. Loren was left in the dark and silence to ignore his own gnawing hunger pains.

It was some time later before he thought to try and speak to the girl. The darkness had an anaesthetic effect that dulled him of his panic or indeed his reason. More than a few times, he just barely stopped himself from falling asleep by trying to recite the correct treatment for osteomyelitis but his brain was too foggy to even remember the symptoms.

The fourth time he caught his eyelids drooping, he risked a timid, "Hello?" to the girl, but she didn't even shift in reply. He tried a few more times, generic statements of bedside manner, such as, "Can you tell me your name?", "I'm right here," and, "Everything's going to be okay".

He repeated the last one a few times, in the hope that he'd start to believe it himself.

Eventually he found that singing helped. He'd always liked music, but never enough to perform in front of other people. In the dark and the silence, it was easy to forget that anyone else was there.

He sang an old song, one of his mother's favourites, stumbling over the words he couldn't quite remember. The cave lent its own curious acoustics to his voice, made it sound like it was coming from somewhere outside of him. The thought soothed him. He was struggling to remember the chorus when he heard a murmur from somewhere beside him.

"Excuse me?" he said, his confidence falling away. "Did you say something?"

"The words… you got them wrong."

The girl's voice was shaky and broken, but Loren almost laughed with relief.

"It's 'cause I'm tired of _feeling_ alone'...not ' _being_ alone'," she added.

"You know it?"

"Of course."

The cave fell as quiet as it was dark. Loren shifted uncomfortably in his bindings.

"I didn't say you should stop."

Loren flushed with colour, and was glad she couldn't see him. "Singing?"

"Yeah," the girl agreed. "Go on...please."

He tried to ignore the sound of her fluttering breaths, to imagine that he was alone. And he sang, because it was all he could do. She let him continue, uninterrupted, until he fumbled a running note and she stepped in to help. Her voice was small and wavering, but for every verse they completed together, she began to sound that little bit stronger. Loren took comfort in the fact, and by the time they reached the end of the song, his self-consciousness had slipped away with his exhaustion. They met the final note together like a duet that had been accompanying one another for years.

The last note rang out in the echoes of the cave, and they fell silent once again. Loren didn't want to speak, didn't want to break the spell of safety they'd created for themselves in that dank, dark prison. But soon he found his questions burned more intensely than his skin wounds.

"Who is he? The man who's captured us?"

"I don't know his name, but I call him Ocelot. You know, because of the hair. He's a Grounder," the girl paused. "Earth-born."

"Are they trying to hurt us?"

"They've hurt some of us, yeah."

"Aren't you scared?"

She sucked in a breath that might have contained her answer. "We just have to wait for our chance. That's all."

He tried to imagine the two of them, injured and weak from hunger, trying to overwhelm the huge man to escape. Every scenario he pictured played out badly for them. He wouldn't tell her that. He refused to crush her spirit.

"You're Loren Matthews, aren't you?" The girl asked. "How did you get here?"

Loren was pleasantly surprised. The girl knew him, though they hadn't exchanged a single word on the Ark. "Yes, that's right. I… I borrowed an escape pod."

"Borrowed?" She chuckled. "That implies you're going to give it back. I think the word you're looking for is 'stole'. You stole an escape pod."

He didn't have a defence for that. It was, after all, the truth. It didn't sound as though she was judging him, but she could, if she wanted. Because he knew her, had known her from the moment he'd seen her face. She was a piece of his own personal puzzle, the reason he was here on Earth in the first place. "It wasn't for nothing though. I've been given a mission, and I think it involves you, Seren."

"Wait, what did you just call me?"

The unmistakeable sound of footsteps could be heard from the mouth of the cave. Loren guessed it must have been a tunnel, from the way the sound travelled, reverberating endlessly around the mossy walls.

Loren tried to explain as quickly as he could. "I recognised you, when I saw you earlier. I have a picture of you, in a box I was given. It has your name on the back: 'Seren Hecate Ward'. It had your birthday too, you're a Taurus."

The torch of their captor was throwing erratic light all around the cave. Both of them winced at the brightness, but now Loren could see he was right, beyond a doubt. The impression of her was much younger, but yes, she was definitely the girl in the picture.

"That's not my name," the girl breathed. "I'm Marlow. _Driftwood_. I don't know where you got this picture, but –"

" _Shof op!"_ came a booming voice from the cave entrance.

It was the man Marlow had dubbed Ocelot, and if the tone of his voice hadn't silenced them, the look on his face might just have. Loren was sure he had imagined how spiteful and cruel the man had looked, during his quiet hours in the dark. It seemed the reality was much harsher.

Both Loren and Seren – Marlow, whoever she was – watched the man with lips shut tight and eyes downcast. He set his torch into the rocky wall, then did something Loren would never have expected. He sat down cross-legged on the floor. He stared at them, then slowly, from his pack, produced a strip of white meat, browned at the edges from the fire it had been cooked in.

The smell flooded the cave immediately. Loren's mouth filled with saliva, his tongue already imagining the taste. The meat on the Ark had become a rare, tasteless thing – a product of a hundred years of close interbreeding and chemical injections to replace the sunlight the animals would never again see. But _this_. This was the real thing. Loren guessed it was the breast of a chicken, or maybe a pheasant. All he knew for sure was his hunger.

Wordlessly, the Grounder began peeling strips from the tiny breast. He held it up between pinched fingers with cracked and dirty nails.

"How many of you are there?" he said, in English devoid of any accent.

Loren and Marlow exchanged a glance. The game was clear: play along, give him the information, and their prize would be the food they so desperately craved. _Let him try_ , Loren thought, jaw clenching as though to keep the words locked behind his teeth. There was no way either of them would –

"A hundred," Marlow answered in a heartbeat. "Plus one, if you count him."

The Grounder tossed the meat at Marlow like she was a dog collecting scraps under the table. She caught it, and Loren heard her swallow.

Had she gone mad from the hunger? She was betraying her people. He'd seen enough interrogations in old movies to know this wasn't how things were supposed to play out. There was supposed to be a battle of wits, a threat, or at the very least a refusal.

"Do you have weapons?"

"Some," Marlow confirmed. "But soon we'll have more."

He tossed her the chicken. She ate.

"Where from?"

"We're making them," she answered. "Can I have a drink this time?"

The Grounder obliged, pushing the cup to her lips. She thanked him obediently.

"What kind of weapons are these?"

"Bombs, mostly. But we've made other things, more basic. Like that knife you took from me."

Marlow nodded towards the wooden knife tucked into Ocelot's leather belt. He shrugged his indifference. "It's a good knife. At least for skinning chickens." Suddenly he looked at Loren. "You. Why have you come here?"

Loren stiffened. "I can't tell you."

"You _can't?_ " The Grounder said through gritted teeth, the meat dangling tantalizingly from his fingers.

"I won't!" Loren clarified, shaking his head so his curls covered his eyes.

The man turned to Marlow. "Do _you_ know why he's here?"

"We haven't had much chance to talk, but he said he had a mission. Apparently he has some photograph of me. That's all I know."

He threw her the chicken. Loren felt a black hole begin where his stomach should be, and he wasn't entirely sure it was from the hunger.

Ocelot wiped his hands on his dusty clothes. "Pretty little boy wants to starve," he observed. "Suit yourself." He crammed the remainder of the food into his own mouth, sucking the grease from each finger as he did so. Without another word, he packed up his things, took his torch, and left them in the darkness.

Loren couldn't find the composure to speak to her for a long time. He was still battling his disbelief when Marlow finally said, "I know it's not much, but I let a piece fall on to the floor. It's about a hand-span away from my right foot, if you can find it."

Loren didn't move.

"Why did you do that?" he asked weakly, into the darkness. "Why would you sell out your friends to someone like him?"

Marlow's voice was steady when she eventually chose to reply. "That wasn't an interrogation."

"It looked like one to me."

"It was a trust exercise. Everything he asked us, he knew the answer to already. He's been watching our camp, setting up traps to catch us. He knows how many of us there are, what weapons we have. If he watches closely enough he'll see the bombs being made."

"You shouldn't have told him about the photograph."

"You told him yourself!" Marlow sounded incredulous. "Announcing it at the top of your voice while he was coming in here. He even knows my star sign, for God's sake. Why would you even _say_ that out loud?"

Loren scratched at the ground with his bound feet, feeling like a scolded child. "I didn't know he could speak English," he muttered.

"So treat this as a learning experience. We know the guy speaks English, he's stingy with his rations, he smells like a skunk's armpit – and, most importantly, if we want any chance at all of getting out of here, we have to play along with his games."


End file.
